DLIST and DL-Harvest will be participating at the 71st IFLA general conference poster session this month in Oslo, Norway. If you're attending IFLA, please do stop by and visit! Don't know what DLIST or DL-Harvest is? Well, DLIST stands for the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology and Dl-Harvest is the open access aggregator and federated search system that accompanies it. DLIST is an open access archive for the scholarly outputs in the Information Sciences - related disciplines like Library Science, Computer Science, Archives Management, and Museum Informatics; this includes our "cultural institutions" which are also our critical information infrastructures for powering the knowledge or information society. Through DL-Harvest, other open archives (such as ArXiV) are selectively harvested for related subjects (example, digital libraries) and made searchable through a single interface. Try DLIST, the federated Dl-Harvest search out today - especially, if you've never done so! We currently have 11 archives from all over the world and plans in the fall include streamlining the harvesting and the search engine further.
As far as I am concerned the important scholarly behaviors that DLIST is trying to effect changes in are related both to the conduct and the dissemination of scholarshp in LIS. One, we want scholars to self-archive their works. Two, we want scholars to start doing open research. At this point, the first is more important than the second (i.e. the second will follow automatically). However, in DLIST, very few scholars self-archive. This despite us sending over 500 letters in December 2004 to faculty in LIS schools in the US and to the deans and directors of these schools announcing DLIST and inviting their participation. Since faculty are typically overloaded, we also offered copyright research, metadata creation and deposit services to support self-archiving. But the response has been very poor. So we have started to plan self-archiving tutorials/workshops at major conferences - unfortunately, our plans to offer one at JCDL 2005 came to naught when only 2 people registered before the early date for the workshop. I am puzzled by what I perceive as disinterest in the LIS community in self-archiving, supporting open access in their own discipline, and increasing impact to their own literary outputs. I would have thought that an initiative like DLIST fitted with the core discipline value - to make knowledge accessible! Feel free to comment or drop me a line if you have any thoughts on this matter.
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