mostly research stuff
after reading article upon article about this google-for-scholars bit, i felt compelled to set the record straight on this one - lest folks should imagine that google is in fact driving all change in scholarly search…first of all, i’m not just talking about crossref, which is in fact an open standard - i’m talking about crossref plus other stuff - namely google coopting dspace…so first, to clarify the crossref thing: the relationship between google and crossref is not exclusive (people have gotta stop making it sound like only google cares, because it just ain’t true!)…and there are problems with crossref, the main issue was discussed again recently by katy sidwell….summary: “the problem with CrossRef is that it does not address the ‘appropriate copy’ problem for libraries, nor does it give libraries any control over the route to resources for users…it is not enough on its own.”
…for those unfamiliar with dspace, it’s a few years old and presents a wonderful step forward for research (oh shit, there’s that ‘wonderful’ word…i’m gonna have to kick my own ass for using it again)…”DSpace is a groundbreaking digital library system to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output of a university’s research faculty in digital formats…Developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP)…now freely available to research institutions world-wide”…the most important note to take down here is that this relationship between google and dspace is not exclusive, and so any other search engine might jump on this resource base…dspace is software for libraries, not an archive in and of itself (not sure that people understand that completely, just wanted to spell it out)
an article from last fall in the chronicle of higher education is on the dspace site, but what is not on the dspace site is the more recent critical article (at this link, but you’ll need to pay money to view) which discusses the problems that dspace is facing…short version is as follows: each of the 17 participants has an average of about 1,000 papers in the archives (some have more, like mit with over 3,500, or australian national university with over 34 thousand)..but most are around 100 (yes, only two zeros)…to get this humming along, google and dspace are working with the worldwide library collaborative group oclc (online computer library center) to act as an intermediary between google (aka el Goog) and the schools..apparently, the system that dspace uses to tag data doesn’t work well for google…
these folks might learn a thing or two from michael keller’s project at stanford (highwire press) which i think deserves it’s own little write-up, so i’ll hold off on commentary for now..
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
David
August 2nd, 2004 at 8:49 pm
oh, sorry, just realized that this assumes a lotta knowledge on behalf of the reader. if it made zero sense to you, then, uh, not sure what to tell you…keep coming back until it does?