From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 14:29:06 +0100

Seventeen years ago 25 people gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to
discuss ways in which the growing number of e-print servers and
digital repositories could be made interoperable.

As scholarly archives and repositories had begun to proliferate a
number of issues had arisen. There was a concern, for instance, that
archives would needlessly replicate each other’s content, and that
users would have to learn multiple interfaces in order to use them.
What was therefore needed was to develop tools and protocols that
would allow repositories to work in concert on a distributed basis.
Above all, there was a need to make distributed archives interoperable
so that their content could be aggregated into a single searchable
virtual archive of (eventually) all published research.

The meeting led to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and to the institutional repository movement.
Today there are thousands of institutional repositories around the
world.

Yet 17 years later the interoperability promised by OAI-PMH has not
really materialised, few third-party service providers have emerged to
leverage the content in repositories, and duplication has not been
avoided. Moreover, to the exasperation of green OA advocates, authors
have proved reluctant to take on the task of depositing their papers
in these repositories. Some therefore now believe that the
institutional repository faces an existential threat. At the very
least, they say, it is time to re-think the role and purpose of the
institutional repository.

These and other matters are discussed in an interview with Clifford
Lynch, director of the Washington-based Coalition for Networked
Information and one of those who attended the Santa Fe meeting.

The Q&A (plus introduction) can be accessed here:
http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/q-with-cnis-clifford-lynch-time-to-re_22.html


Richard Poynder