Re: PALS report and conference on Institutional Repositories

From: Mark Ware <mark_at_markwareconsulting.com>
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 02:29:22 +0000

Colin
Thank you for this, very interesting. I was sorry to miss the OAI
workshop (other work commitments precluded) it looks to have been a
useful event.

My report was never intended to be a fully comprehensive piece of work -
it was commissioned as "pathfinder" research for a conference, i.e. as
background research to help plan the conference, and it was done over a
fairly short period of time. I've had some other correspondence
suggesting other gaps/additions (e.g. CDSWare felt they should have had
more coverage). I've agreed with PALS that we should produce an updated
version to include information like this that could make the report more
useful and I'll certainly include some more information on ANU now I've
read your slides! I'll wait to see what else arrives and then probably
do a quick update something in the next couple of weeks.

As others have noted, I was more interested in the broader view of
institutional repositories (I find Cliff Lynch very persuasive) - the
brief for the conference was to take a narrow perspective on what makes
IRs special/different (e.g. excluding subject-based eprint
repositories). So I find the Australian experience you report very
interesting in this context.

I'm giving a short talk at the PALS conference in June based on my
report (www.palsgroup.org.uk/palsconference04), so I'll need to update
my facts for the that and may (time permitting) think about a fuller
update then - a lot has already happened since the report was finished
in mid-January. Any suggestions for other areas to develop would be
welcome!

Regards
 -Mark
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-----Original Message-----
From: Colin Steele [mailto:Colin.Steele_at_anu.edu.au]
Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2004 12:49 AM
To: mark_at_markwareconsulting.com
Cc: Harnad (E-mail); Steve Hitchcock (E-mail)
Subject: PARLS report

Mark

In relation to your very useful and clear report on repositories, you
might be interested in the talk I gave recently in Geneva at the OAI
conference - we would argue that we were a little further ahead than
some of the European initiatives documented in your report and certainly
have more than most of the UK repositories at the present time. See the
ANU figures for example.
http://agenda.cern.ch/fullAgenda.php?ida=a035925

We have deliberately targeted the non-Science areas and attempted to
harvest material back from repositories such as the physics archive, as
well as harvesting websites here. The amount of downloads shows that the
more material you get in ...

Grateful if you could give us a plug if you do future updates as we
often feel neglected in the southern hemisphere in northern hemisphere
reports!

You might also be interested in the government grants of $12 million to
institutional repositories in Australia which are far wider than
textual, which were announced late last year.
http://www.dest.gov.au/Ministers/Media/McGauran/2003/10/mcg002221003.asp



Colin

--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002)
and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)
W.K. Hancock Building (043)
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia

Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983
Fax +61 (0)2 612 55526
Email: colin.steele_at_anu.edu.au
Received on Fri Mar 05 2004 - 02:29:22 GMT

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