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diff --git a/fatcat-rfc.md b/fatcat-rfc.md index 67eeca2f..4f34f9de 100644 --- a/fatcat-rfc.md +++ b/fatcat-rfc.md @@ -10,6 +10,31 @@ URL-agnostic file-level metadata. Fatcat is currently used internally at the Internet Archive, but interested folks are welcome to contribute to design and development. +## Goals and Ecosystem Niche + +For the Internet Archive use case, fatcat has two primary use cases: + +- Track the "completeness" of our holdings against all known published works. + In particular, allow us to monitor and prioritize further collection work. +- Be a public-facing catalog and access mechanism for our open access holdings. + +In the larger ecosystem, fatcat could also provide: + +- A work-level (as opposed to title-level) archival dashboard: what fraction of + all published works are preserved in archives? KBART, CLOCKSS, Portico, and + other preservations don't provide granular metadata +- A collaborative, independent, non-commercial, fully-open, field-agnostic, + "completeness"-oriented catalog of scholarly metadata +- Unified (centralized) foundation for discovery and access across repositories + and archives: discovery projects can focus on user experience instead of + building their own catalog from scratch +- Research corpus for meta-science, with an emphasis on availability and + reproducibility (metadata corpus itself is open access, and file-level hashes + control for content drift) +- Foundational infrastructure for distributed digital preservation +- On-ramp for non-traditional digital works ("grey literature") into the + scholarly web + ## Technical Architecture The canonical backend datastore exposes a microservice-like HTTP API, which |