Re: [EP-underground] The archival status of archived papers

Hmmm. You're not the only person with this, or similar, requirements.

A possible solution would be to:
 * allow users to move items they deposited back to the workarea
 * always increment the document number and allow "deprecation" of
    documents rather than deletion, so that a sensible 404 message
    can be created.

This is a painful compromise between data-quality and the needs of
users. As an interim solution I could supply a command line script
for returning eprints to the workarea.

I don't want authors editing items live in the archive as this
defeats the editorial process.

OR

I could sort out the 404 page to explain that "this item is deleted
but there is a newer version" which I should have done all along.

On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 01:27:15 +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>  On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Belinda Weaver wrote:
> 
> > We've had complaints from archive contributors because they 
> > cannot edit their papers once they have been deposited. If they 
> > want to make a change, they have to clone their paper, edit the 
> > clone and deposit that and then request removal of the original. 
> >
> > This means an URL change which is the very thing we don't want 
> > to see - we promised permanent URLs and if they get a new URL 
> > for a cloned paper, then it's harder for them as they have often 
> > linked to the URL or mailed it out to colleagues. 
> 
> > This became an issue as one staffer deposited a lot of materials which
> > he wanted to upgrade a little later with references etc. Since I did
> > not know about his plans, I moved them to the main archive and he thus
> > lost control over them from an editing point of view - unless he asked
> > me to bounce all 32 back which is rather time consuming.  In the
> > end he had to clone all 32 papers which seems really daft. Any 
> > hope of a change here? We couldn't leave the earlier records in 
> > the archive as the papers themselves were identical - only the 
> > metadata had changed a little.
> > 
> > Belinda Weaver, Co-ordinator, UQ E-Print Archive
> > University of Queensland Library
> > University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia 4072.
> > Tel   : +617 336 58281 Fax : +617 336 57930
> > Email : [email protected]
> 
> An archive is an archive. What one deposits in there one presumably wants
> to keep in there, permanently. If something is a working paper, and one
> wants to archive it, that's fine, but if there is a subsequent revised
> draft, that gets archived too. The first draft is linked to the update,
> and anyone who accesses the one will always see the link to the other. And
> so on for successive drafts, with dates.
> 
> That's how archiving and version control works. Now if a depositor
> wants to use the archive for something other than archival purposes,
> and the archive administrator allows it, that's fine too. The original
> deposit can be deleted, and only the new draft left in. The old draft's
> URL, however, for archival reasons, is suppressed if the paper has been
> deleted. Internally, it is still an archival milestone, but now blank
> and inaccessible.
> 
> Now it is conceivable that the eprints architecture can be slightly
> modified, so that the old, suppressed URL for the deleted paper
> automatically redirects to the new draft if someone tries to access
> the old one. That I have to let Chris reply about. Here I have merely
> explained the rationale for not having designed the archive so a paper
> could be deposited, and then modified willy-nilly under the same URL.
> For that would not have been an archive at all, and user complaints,
> about trying to use and cite a moving target, would have far out-numbered
> depositor complaints about what to do with after-thoughts and successive
> drafts.
> 
> There might also be a way to modify the architecture so that if the
> changes are in the metadata only, and not the paper's text-body itself,
> then this can be done while retaining the same URL. I again leave it to
> Chris to reply about that.
> 
> Stevan Harnad
> 

-- 

 Christopher Gutteridge                   [email protected]
 ePrints2 Coder, Support and Stuff        +44 23 8059 4833