There's an interesting slide show (from last month's CNI Task Force meeting) describing the Object Re-use and Exchange Initiative (ORE) on the Open Archives Initiative web site. Consistent with the 2004 D-Lib Magazine article that I referenced in my last post, ORE focuses upon the need to better reference resources. One example, the subject of slide 18, is the lack of consistency in referencing resources. Consider Google harvesting for two WSU-based repositories: for the NWDA, the unit of harvest is the HTML derivative of the finding aid (essentially, the full text); for the Research Exchange repository, the unit of harvest by Google is the item page (essentially an abstract page) which has links to one or more bitstreams.
The relevance to the current Libraries repository projects is stated on slide 4: ORE is designed to "establish the technical basis for repositories [becoming] the fundamental building blocks of the digital scholarly communication system." The need for ORE is best understood through an analysis of the shortcomings of OAI-PMH's support for identifiers; OAI-PMH metadata is "characterized by scarce, inconsistent, and ambiguous resource URLs."
The re-use issue was discussed in detail during this December presentation. Based upon my discussions with colleagues on campus working on repository projects, the ability to repurpose institutional repository content will to a great degree determine the success or failure of the Research Exchange service. It's not something that the DSpace software does well natively.
Some of the concepts in this presentation are quite complex and I'm going to have to spend some time in reviewing this info....
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