hussein suleman writes
> this is a good question that i will try to answer, based on a fading memory ...
>
>
> in the 90s we had a few large subject repositories around the world (like
> arXiv) but they were mostly not (financially) sustainable as they were run by
> poor scholarly societies, there was a silo effect (with the owners of data
> trying to provide services as well) and the model simply did not replicate to
> all disciplines (we were stuck with a handful of poster child repositories) ...
> in some senses, this "crisis" in subject repositories led to the Santa Fe
> meeting of the OAI.
Your memory is indeed fading.
The Santa Fe meeting was informed by work of a group of authors:
Herbert Van de Sompel, Thomas Krichel, Michael L. Nelson, Patrick
Hochstenbach, Victor M. Lyapunov, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Mohamed
Kholief, Xiaoming Liu, and Heath O'Connell, The UPS Prototype project:
exploring the obstacles in creating across e-print archive end-user
service, Old Dominion University Computer Science TR 2000-01, February
2000.
This is the full version. There is a censored version of it that
apeared in D-LIB magazine, but the above is the full version,
I still have a copy at
http://openlib.org/home/krichel/papers/upsproto.pdf
The project looked at building a user service uniting
contents from the following archives: arXiv, CogPrints, NACA,
NCSTRL, NDLTD and RePEc.
Out of these NCSTRL is out of business, it was NSF funded, as
soon as the funding stopped, it was dropped, bascially. Thus
http://dlib.cs.odu.edu/publications.htm
has a link to the full version, but it's a dead link to
a server at Cornell where NCSTRL services lived. But
all the others are still in business.
> but who is willing to invest a lot of money and many years on
> redoing an experiment that failed in many instances not too long
> ago?
I would be interested in seeing a list of these "many instances".
There is indeed a problem of grant-funded digital libraries
failing when the grant expires. This continues to be a serious
problem. But I don't think this was the impetus for the OAI
work.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel
Received on Sat Mar 08 2008 - 13:04:40 GMT