[OAI-general] RE: OAI-general digest, Vol 1 #74 - 1 msg

[Chris Rusbridge]

In a business world this might be an ideal solution. In the Universities I
have worked in, there tends to be much less flexibility in the use of cash,
and one quite often ends up making counter-intuitive decisions as a result.
We have an infrastructure to support our library and computing needs; in
theory, adding an e-prints server to this is a marginal issue, but finding
the cash to out-source it would be very definitely not marginal.

>From what I have seen in local discussions, the cost is likely to be
dominated by two other issues. First is the extent to which any kind of
selection process is applied to the material deposited. As an initial stab,
we have decided just to issue general guidelines, but to make no checks. I'm
a little worried this may be irreversible.

The other issue is the time spent depositing papers. We already have to put
references to all published papers into a central database, and there is
great difficulty persuading academics to find the time for this (especially
for their 'back set' of articles). We can't (yet) import that data into the
ePrints.org system we run, which means academics would have to do it twice.
This will limit early adoption to those who care greatly...

--
Chris Rusbridge
Director of Information Services, University of Glasgow
GLASGOW G12 8QQ
phone 0141 330 2516   fax 0141 330 5620 
email: C.Rusbridge@compserv.gla.ac.uk

> -----Original Message-----
> From: oai-general-admin@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
> [mailto:oai-general-admin@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu]On Behalf Of H.M.
> Gladney
> Sent: 19 January 2002 17:22 PM
> To: oai-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
> Subject: [OAI-general] RE: OAI-general digest, Vol 1 #74 - 1 msg
> 
> 
> There is a bothersome implicit assumption in these notes--that an
> e-print archive needs to manage (part of) its own servers.
> 
> Another possibility is that an archive buy storage and Web 
> services from
> one of giant server farm companies that many businesses find 
> practical.
> Doing so is likely to have several large advantages over any kind of
> "roll your own" (aka RYO) solution: avoided administrative headaches,
> automatic capacity management (as alluded to in the attached 
> note), very
> short delay between proposal and service delivery, and probably (TBD)
> lower cost than RYO.
> 
> If someone can identify strong arguments against this proposition, I'd
> much enjoy hearing them and perhaps having a friendly debate.
> 
> Regards, Henry
> 
> Henry Gladney, Ph.D       (408)867-5454
> HMG Consulting
> 20044 Glen Brae Drive, Saratoga CA 95070
> http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/
> 
> ----Original Message-----
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: ePrints Support [mailto:support@ecs.soton.ac.uk]
> > Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 3:39 AM
> > To: Bob Kemp
> > Cc: EPrints Underground List; jisc-dner@JISCMAIL.AC.UK;
> > september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org;
> > oai-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
> > Subject: Re: [OAI-general] Re: [EP-underground] Sustaining ePrints
> >
> >
> > One issue in the design of eprints-2 is that it is geared 
> up to allow
> > many (smaller) archives to be run on one physical computer.
> > Which means
> > that a larger organisation could buy one "chunky" computer and then
> > provide eprints archives with seperate customisations, OAI
> > exports (and
> > colour schemes) for various departments which don't have the
> > resources and
> > expertise to do this themseleves. This should reduce the cost
> > in parts (and
> > system admin hours!) to get several archives going.
> 
> In addition, should a particular archive become heavily used, 
> moving it
> to a
> dedicated box is a snap. You really loose nothing with a multi-archive
> (versus monolith) design, and gain so much. Thanks to OAI protocols,
> developing an institute wide interface to all the small archives isn't
> much
> of a hassle -- in fact kinda unnecessary due to ARC
> (http://arc.cs.odu.edu/). If you can't tell, I'm a fan of this design.
> 
> > This would probably work out more cost effective than buying
> > and installing
> > a machine and having learn the ins-and outs of the system 
> for a single
> > archive. EPrints is free, so we don't have to grub for
> > licenses by requiring
> > one copy per archive :)
> 
> Hurrah for free (GPL) software!
> 
> > My own server, running eprints-alpha-2, is running
> > demoprints.eprints.org,
> > eprints.aktors.org + a couple of other test archives. Later,
> > it will be
> > running our department publications archive and an archive of
> > Ted Nelsons
> > material.
> >
> > The bottle neck is processor power, caused by larger datasets
> > but mostly
> > by "hits". So large, popular archives should probably run on
> > their own
> > machine.
> 
> Some more metrics: on my un-optimized server, eprints/apache/mysql
> altogether require about 40MB of memory per archive. Most web hits are
> from
> robots and some from OAI harvesters (as it should be).  We have 10
> archives
> now, though some are just skeletons waiting for our authors 
> to "see the
> light" so to speak.
> 
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> Ed Sponsler - Sr. Applications Development
> Caltech Library System
> eds@library.caltech.edu
> http://library.caltech.edu/digital
> 
> 
> --__--__--
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