Open Archive Solutions to Traditional Archive/Library Cooperation

The diffusion of Internet is changing the role of archives and libraries and it is opening a wide range of new possibilities. The new vision is that in few years it will be possible to cross-access multiple libraries, archives, museums, and data repositories. The implementation of this revolutionary vision requires the solution of a number of technical, organizational, sociological, and economical issues. Recently, the proposal of a new, low cost technical solution for open repositories of pre-print material, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, has greatly stimulated the discussion about these issues in many application frameworks. This paper overviews the status of this discussion in the library and conventional archives frameworks.