John Robertson of JISC CETIS has announced that the final version (1.5) of An Ecological Approach to Repository and Service Interactions has been released.
Here's an excerpt:
Ecology is the study of systems that are complex, dynamic, and full of interacting entities and processes. Although the nature of these interactions and processes may be highly detailed, a higher level view of them is accessible by and intuitive to non-specialists. We think that ecology, and examples of the ecosystems it studies, may offer a useful analogy to inform the task of understanding and articulating the interactions between users, repositories, and services and the information environments in which they take place. This report outlines some concepts from ecology that may be useful and suggests some definitions for a common conversation about the use of this metaphor. It concludes by examining how this approach relates to other initiatives currently ongoing in the JISC Information Environment.
