[LIS-Forum] Fw: OpenDOAR hits 1000th Repository

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

>From Leslie Carr of Southampton University

Congratulations to the OpenDOAR team for keeping track of all these  
repositories. I wish them even more future success!

The magic figure of 1,000 is both a milestone for OpenDOAR and an  
opportunity for reflection by the community. In the computing field  
some twenty years ago the NeXT workstation was designed to be the  
first 3'M' workstation - ie one that had more than one Megabyte of  
RAM, a Megapixel display and Megaflop performance. In the intervening  
time, workstation performance has increased hugely and my workstation  
has 2 megapixel display, a 2,000 megabyte memory and performance  
measured in tens of thousands of megaflops.

But the scale of the repository world is measured in thousands (K)  
rather than millions (M). As well as the 1,000 representing the number   
of repositories, it describes the size of their contents (repositories   
commonly hold around 1,000 items) and the size of their constituency  
(each serves around 1,000 faculty/academic users). So the repository  
world is currently in a 3'K' state.

But what can we expect from the future? University communities are  
likely to stay the same size but the number of repositories will  
increase - perhaps by a factor of ten (to include all the institutions   
across the world) - or perhaps by a hundred (as individual departments   
and projects get their own repositories). But the real growth will  
come from capturing an increasing proportion of the thousands of  
thousands of faculty and researchers and research students for each of   
those repositories. If every person contributed 10 items every year to   
their repository (research outputs, publications, posters, data sets,  
presentations, teaching materials) then over the course of a decade a  
typical repository would accrue 100,000 items.

So in ten year's time I look forward to ten times as many repositories   
each containing a hundred times as many items as the present.

But size isn't everything, and its important to think about how such a   
change in capacity might lead to new capabilities. Looking back on the   
computer world, the 3M technical capacity achieved in the NeXT  
workstation gave Tim Berners-Lee the platform on which he was able to  
design and implement the first prototypes of the World Wide Web. And  
so I look forward to unprecedented improvements in scientific and  
scholarly enquiry created by a huge increase in repository capacity  
and openly accessible knowledge.

Once again, congratulations to Bill, Pete, Gareth, Stephen and all the   
OpenDOAR technical and reviewing teams!
--
Les Carr

Caveats: obviously in the above text I'm working in approximate  
scales, rather than statistically valid estimates. But while some find   
it unrealistic, I stand by my assertion that every faculty member  
could reasonably contribute ten "intellectual outputs" per year to  
their repository. For more figures and calculations to support this,  
see http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july07/carr/07carr.html


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