Ulf Rehmann: Position Statement
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Contents |
There is an impressive amount of digitized mathematical literature
available via the Internet. There are the big commercial publishers, but also, there is a tremendous amount of material distributed over various repositories wordlwide, collected by scientific libraries and other institutions.
However, all these repositories are
- hard to find
- by no means uniformly organized
- often unwilling to share their content with others by exchange of data and software
- partially expensive (commercial publishers)
and therefore
- difficult to use.
Digitized material is
- presented in complicated ways
- technically in bad shape (e.g., no ocr)
- subject to copyright conditions, since copyright is
- owned by publishers (true almost always for recent material)
- partially invented/created even by the repositories
even for old content, which is already out of authors' copyright.
Conclusion:
Even though we have digitized a significant fraction of our literature,
this fraction is not easy to find nor to access nor to use.
What should be done? (An idealistic perspective)
- Create and maintain a central registry for all digitized material. A basis could be something like http://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/DML/dml_links.html
- Encourage all repositories to support that central registry actively (e.g., by presenting public OAI records or equivalent for their material).
- Issue some detailed "best practice" recommendations for displaying digitized material like http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/DML/dml_standards_fin/, formulated in one of the former projects do develope the DML.
Be clear and short here. Don't leave things vague here!
- Give recommendations concerning copyright and maintenance of digital resources, which encourage the distribution of data and the mirroring at many places. Keep in mind: this gives a proactive (and cheap!) basis for long term preservation: compare the Stanford LOCKSS philosophy ("Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe!").
- Good models for a non centralized, user driven development of the DML are given by the
- Open Software movement
- Wikipedia movement
