Wednesday, May 10, 2006

arxiv and trackback

I recently listened Paul Ginsparg's interview by CNI, it touches history and ongoing development of arXiv.

This is the first time that I heard arXiv has trackback feature, see http://arxiv.org/help/trackback, as always, arXiv does everything differently (no kidding, I am a regular arxiv user), and seems there was a hot debate about its policy a while ago in physics blogsphere.

I then quickly checked hubmed and WPopac, two blog-style library service, it's no suprise that both support trackback.

However, arXiv is unusual, because its interface/functions is stable for quite some years, it shows what's quality and good design. Now it has a trackback, the fact shows quite nicely how new techologies can be integrated with established library service.