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 ________________________________________________________ You're not bound to your email address, it's a snitch to switch. Give Yahoo! Mail a try. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/mail/isp_targeting2.html -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.