Re: ARL Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Charles,

Many thanks for your helpful replies to the three questions 
(though in fact those weren't actually the three questions I had 
in mind!).

I was in fact wondering about the following three questions 
(though I am not implying that you are the one who ought to know 
or provide the answers!):

(1) Why, among all the means mentioned for recruiting content, 
ARL did not mention the most powerful and successful of them all 
(institution/funder mandates)?

     http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000375/

(2) Why were the average costs for start-up and annual 
maintenance for ARL archives ($182,550; $113,543) so high?

     Cf:
http://library.uncw.edu/web/faculty/kempr/documents/listserv-summary-IR-open-source-costs.xls
http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4443.html

(3) Why does the distribution of softwares used to create ARL IRs in particular
seem to be so skewed, compared to the US and worldwide distribution:

                     dspace/bepress/eprints

     ARL IRs:        23d/7b/0e
     US total IRs:   36d/40b/33e
     World IRs:      111d/47b/123e

     Source: ROAR http://archives.eprints.org/

Best wishes, Stevan

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

On Tue, 22 Aug 2006, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. wrote:

> Stevan:
> Thanks for your comments.
>
> What is ARL?
>
> "ARL is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries at 
> comprehensive, research-extensive institutions in the US and 
> Canada that share similar research missions, aspirations, and 
> achievements. It is an important and distinctive association 
> because of its membership and the nature of the institutions 
> represented. ARL member libraries make up a large portion of 
> the academic and research library marketplace, spending more 
> than one billion dollars every year on library materials." 
> http://www.arl.org/arl/arlfacts.html
>
> What libraries are in ARL? http://www.arl.org/members.html The 
> survey was restricted to ARL members, 71% of whom responded.
>
> How was an IR defined in the survey? "For the purposes of this 
> survey an IR is simply defined as a permanent, institution-wide 
> repository of diverse locally produced digital works (e.g., 
> article preprints and postprints, data sets, electronic theses 
> and dissertations, learning objects, technical reports, etc.) 
> that is available for public use and supports metadata 
> harvesting. If an institution shares an IR with other 
> institutions, it is within the scope of this survey. Not 
> included in this definition are scholars' personal Web sites; 
> academic department, school, or other unit digital archives 
> that are primarily intended to store digital materials created 
> by members of that unit; or disciplinary archives that include 
> digital materials about one or multiple subjects that have been 
> created by authors from many different institutions (e.g., 
> arXiv.org)."
>
> Best Regards,
> Charles
>
> Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Digital Library
> Planning and Development, University of Houston Libraries
> E-Mail: cbailey@digital-scholarship.com
> Publications: http://www.digital-scholarship.com/
> (Provides access to DigitalKoans, Open Access Bibliography,
> Open Access Webliography, Scholarly Electronic Publishing
> Bibliography, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog,
> and other publications.)