I'm not sure this is true; focusing purely on current service offerings and requirements limits the development of novel services (thereby limiting potential value), and is an approach that usually results in focusing on a single solution, which limits the ability to innovate in service delivery.
We cannot achieve consistency, so if it is important then we are doomed to failure. Why can't we achieve consistency?
There are (say) 200 universities in the UK, and perhaps 20,000 worldwide, then there are subject repositories, project repositories, library and archive repositories and commercial repositories (which may be free or charged for or a mixture).
There are data repositories, image repositories, paper repositories etc.
All these repositories are set up for particular reasons and will want to achieve different things. What the BBC wants people to do with their's is very different to say NICE or the University of Wigan. They will, inevitably, have different collection policies, different ideas on appropriate metadata standards, different methods of accessing them (an image repository or data repository will require different affordances to a text repository).
To expect any form of consistency - of language, of policy, of metadata, of standards even of legal scope will simply not work.
Indeed, I would suggest that to achieve consistency we would require working in a closed community, and even then it would probably not work.
The alternative is to embrace inconsistency and work with that.
To be honest, I suggested this 'idea' largely in reaction to the 'consistency' theme in the earlier 'ideas'.
If I were worried about consistency of metadata, I would worry less about standards, guidelines, etc, and explore the idea of some robust network-level metadata creation tools. These would have a double advantage: support consistency and support aggregation.
For an example, maybe from a domain on the margins of this discussion, see my note on Calames, the French resource for archival finding aids.
The value-added service that I can believe in that requires consistency, is the creation of "virtual subject repositories" by linking across actual institutional repositories. In fact, the single major plus-point of OAI-PMH that I can see (since no-one actually uses the service providers that it can help create) would be to allow these virtual repositories. But the inconsistency of partitioning or subject classification etc makes this difficult or impossible...
I absolutely agree with Chris R about subject services. We keep saying that inst reps will enable rich subject services but the mechanisms aren't in place to enable that. There was a good idea at the rep infrastructures workshop about the potential to AT LEAST map the collections within a oai-pmh friendly repository against an agreed subject taxonomy. If we build a tool for repository administrators to determine their oai-pmh sets like this, we'll be closer to what a potential service provider needs. It wouldn't be fine grained but at least it would distinguish organic chemistry from C20th literature!
We have found it difficult, in practice, to classify (from time and effort and consistency) at the depositor/administrator end, even against an agreed subject taxonomy. I would dream of a consistent service eg auto classification to be overlaid at a higher level, eg national, to enable the valuable 'virtual subject repositories'.
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