22/10/02 pm 12th
National Seminary of University Libraries
Open archives in the evolving information space – libraries and the global perspective
This is an exciting time in the academic information revolution for both researchers and information professionals. As scholars work increasingly in global collaborations, they are constantly looking for more effective but inexpensive platforms for sharing the products of their research – the data and their own publications relating to this data. Following respected pioneers such as the Physics ArXiv of eprints, subject based communities and institutions around the world are building open digital archives to leverage the research output of their own scholars. The gathering international momentum for this activity is fired by such strategic ventures as the Open Archives Initiative, the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the free software available from eprints.org and is supported by a renewed emphasis on global metadata standards. Such open archives – open to be harvested by other added value services - are poised to play a pivotal role both in speeding up scholarly communication and in extending access to a truly worldwide community of scholars.
By participating actively in this information revolution now, libraries and librarians can play a vital role in first establishing and then preserving eprint archives of high quality whether they are for scholars who are self-archiving their work or for those who are taking advantage of new mediated services. Enhanced search services could also be introduced which span both these new more dynamic services and the established literature of the established library. In this way information professionals can use their key skills to support most effectively the information retrieval segment of the infrastructure that academics need to do distributed global research of the highest standard.