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Philip Hunter |
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UKOLN |
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p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk |
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An outline of The Open Archives Forum |
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The Website |
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Published Project Reports |
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The Workshop series (2002-3) |
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Exploitation and Organisational issues |
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European Union IST accompanying measure |
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to
support EU projects and national initiatives |
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with
funding for two years, 2001-3. |
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Partners |
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CNR, Pisa (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche); Humboldt
University, Berlin; |
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UKOLN, University of Bath |
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A Project created to promote the idea of Open
Archives in the European Community. |
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It is interested in the Open Archives Initiative
and the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, but not does not exclude other
approaches. Other Open Archives ideas are possible. |
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The OA-Forum website is at: http://www.oaforum.org/ |
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To exploit in the European context the OAI aim
to provide a
“low barrier interoperability
specification” |
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A technology for accessing a “hidden web” of
European resources |
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Eprints,
the research literature |
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Products
of digitisation projects, including multimedia resources |
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Other
kinds of data |
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Share experience among IST projects,
and also other initiatives |
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Support European input into OAI |
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To provide European focus for dissemination and
sharing experience |
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To
encourage building of infrastructure |
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To
encourage new services |
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To raise
awareness of technical and organisational issues |
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To
provide focus for interaction with OAI |
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To build
a community of interest |
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OA-Forum
Home Page gives access to news, resources, workshop details, and project
documents. |
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Glossary
pages give definitions of important terms used to describe the OAI Protocol
for Metadata Harvesting, and also of associated terminology. |
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This
section gives access to the Open Archives Forum Database, which contains
information about organisations, projects, repositories, services. |
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Information can be added by users. |
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Documents produced in the course of the project are available,
including presentations, workshop reports, community specific expert
reports, etc. |
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Website www.oaforum.org |
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Contains
news, glossary, reports, events, links to external information, an open
archives information source, current implementations database, inventory of
software tools, interoperability issues register |
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Mailing list <info@oaforum.org> |
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Technical Issues Review (final version
forthcoming) |
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Organisational issues Review (final version
forthcoming) |
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Workshop Reports (three so far) |
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Three Community Specific expert reports (two so
far) |
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Interactive Web Tutorial on Open Archives
(forthcoming) |
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Final Project Report (forthcoming) |
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Information sharing and dissemination - Workshop
subjects so far: |
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1st
Workshop: ‘Creating a European Forum on Open Archives Activities’ (Pisa)
2002 |
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2nd
Workshop: ‘Open Access to Hidden Resources’ (Lisbon) 2002 |
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3rd
Workshop: ‘Networking Multimedia Resources’ (Berlin) 2003 |
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4th
Workshop: ‘In Practice, Best Practice’ (4-5 September 2003, Bath) |
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Mark Bide (Rightscom) Open Archives and
Intellectual Property: incompatible world views? [November 2002] |
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George MacKenzie and Goran Kristiansson
(National Archives of Scotland & Lansarkivet i Lund) How Real
Archivists can learn to love the OAI [March 2003] |
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…. discusses the relationship between open
archives and Intellectual Property, and argues that there is ultimately no
conflict between Open Archives and Intellectual Property – but open
archives must work within the framework of Intellectual Property law. |
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The report looks at the potential for using the
OAI-PMH as a simple means of disseminating and exchanging archive
catalogues. |
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It also looks at the appropriateness of the term ‘archive’ as part of the
description of the protocol. |
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Problems with linkages between levels of
description in different archives. |
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The report also looks briefly at alternative
means archivists are using for exchanging metadata, particularly the Z39.50
protocol. |
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The report concludes that OAI will be used by
conventional archives only if three conditions are fulfilled. First,
archivists must be confident that compliant descriptions will respect
archival principles, second, descriptions must be produced with little
effort from existing systems, and third, archivists must believe that the
wider OAI user base contains sufficient numbers of potential users. |
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It is
also important that any sensitive intellectual property rights in the
catalogue descriptions are protected. The report suggests possible
strategies in which archives would produce OAI compliant records for parts
of their descriptions only. |
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Organisational Issues include questions like: |
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Do you have to be able to do everything in order
to have a decent harvestable resource? |
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Should you use Collection Level or Item Level
Description? |
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Do you need a statement of Service Level for
users? |
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How important is publication of the parameters
and character of your metadata, and of the resources available in your
eprints archive? |
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Preservation issues – addressed at all by the
protocol? |
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Persistence of the resources – addressed at all
by the protocol? |
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Other related issues are considered in the OA-F Organisational
Issues Review |
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Is your archive an archive? (covered in the
MacKenzie and Kristiansson expert report) |
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What is the legal status of the eprints in your
archive – are they legally eprints, or are they owned by a publisher? |
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Is
material submitted to your archive owned by your institution or the author?
(at the University of Bath….?) |
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Should
the regulation of IPR issues be by copyright law, or by the law of
contract? |
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Do you
really want every resource for which you have metadata to be available to
users? |
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Librarians might be concerned that the
development of ePrints might result in budget reductions |
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Does it make sense to promote ePrints archives
as locally browsable resources, rather than as part of a global harvestable
resource? |
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Physicists and others already have subject-based
eprint archives – why should they deposit with institutional archives? |
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Do institutions actually want ePrint Archives? |
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IPR
(covered in the Bide report) |
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The
Branding and Ownership issue in a world of distributed resources – ‘can I
build services on the British Libraries metadata?’ |
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Rights
management & Payments – how will this be done on a technical level? |
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How
important to the owners of resources is control over the context in which
the resource appears? |
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Just
because it is possible to make everything available, do you want to do
this? |
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Project
funding is limited – what are your priorities? |
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This tutorial will be based on the pre-workshop
half-day tutorials which were part of the first three workshops in Europe
(Pisa, Lisbon and Berlin). |
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A distillation of these into an interactive
tutorial will be available as a resource to the Open Archives community
from the Open Archives Forum website. |
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The tutorial will be available before the 4th
OA-F workshop in Bath |
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Versions in Italian and German (and possibly
other languages) will be available later. |
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Notes