Adopting Open Protocols to Increase the Impact on Digital Repositories

摘要

Recently the discussion of technological standards became important due to the profusion of new technologies arising from the development of microelectronics, computing, telecommunications, etc. Sometimes, one standard can be adopted or not, depending on the way the competition unfolds. As it is well known, it is not necessarily the best standard which becomes dominant, neither are the consumers who choose it, but the standard from the firm that used the most efficient market strategies. Sometimes a standard takes a long time to become dominant or will not be established because the competition process forces the manufacturers to permanent innovation. Considering the development of digital libraries, the development of diffusion and preservation systems has followed another course, not based on competition, but through the exploration of the symbiosis between Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), Open Archiving Initiative (OAI), and following the Google dominance. From this initiative, the cost of interoperability among digital libraries has greatly diminished. The NSDL (National Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Education Digital Library) defines three levels of cooperation needed to achieve interoperability. The technical level is related to the capacity of each digital library for sharing their metadata and enabling a unified search. The level of correlated content allows distinct repositories to describe their contents uniformly. The organizational level allows the sharing of management and governance of the repositories. This case study describes the open protocols adopted by UFPR in the construction of its digital repository. The digital library's files on logs are used to analyse the increase in the accessibility and visibility of scientific production in this institution.