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From: laws@ai.sri.com (Kenneth I. Laws)
Newsgroups: comp.archives.admin
Subject: Commercial Archives
Message-ID: <LAWS.91Jun22223423@sunset.ai.sri.com>
Date: 23 Jun 91 05:34:23 GMT
Sender: news@unix.SRI.COM
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'Scuse me, I'm new here.

I've been following with great interest Ed's discussion of
the volunteer-moderator problem, together with the cogent
comments of others about sharing the load, growing the net
into a real-world service, and giving people an incentive
to properly catalog their own submissions.

I'm curious about one issue: is the goal to create a single
(distributed) archive?  I can see some efficiency advantages
in avoiding duplicate storage, and some administrative
advantages in having a single indexing system, but I don't
see real-world analogies showing that this is the way to go.
The Library of Congress is a special case, and one could argue
for NASA engineering archives as a model.  But there is no
way that you can compete on a governmental scale.  Why are
you not aiming for separate archives (cross linked, of course)
for each of the different discussion topics?  Each would have
its own librarians, consultants, or priests, and each would
serve a fairly well-defined community.  Access from outside
the community would be by asking someone on the inside.

This is particularly pertinent if you wish to grow a
commercial service -- as I believe you should.  The existance
of a free service like comp.archives makes the next step
very difficult.  (In a like manner, Prof. John McCarthy claims
that the existance of the Arpanet eventually interfered with
commercial network development, leading to the current
revolutionary acceptance of a rather poor FAX standard.)
Beause the transition will be difficult, you will have to
pay very close attention to market forces and realistic
business principles.

The current comp.archives appears to be driven by "technology
push": you have the data available, so you're saving it.
Business doesn't work that way; it works by "pull."  You
have to find customers who need a specific type of data,
then you let them pay for the archiving, indexing, and
knowledgeable data experts.

As an extreme case, you can imagine a host of consultants,
each with his or her own archive.  Each consultant advertises
a specialty, collects related data, indexes it according to
personal needs, seeks out customers, prepares reports, and
occasionally even publishes a book.

Instead of following the consultant model, you seem to be
following the public library model.  Why?  There's no money
in it.

					-- Ken Laws