In a number of postings to this list earlier this month, acknowledgement was made that "research" repositories now need to take account of material in formats other than text. The argument typically is that research outputs can include data files, modelling and various other related objects.
While I have no quarrel with such statements, to my mind they represent a rather narrow view of the management of information and information resources within the HE environment. It is perhaps easiest to illustrate this by citing specific examples from LUDOS, the multimedia repository being developed for the University of Leeds (https://ludos.leeds.ac.uk/). The first thing to say is that you will not find any research papers in LUDOS - those are currently held in the consortial-run repository White Rose Research Online http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ (based on Eprints, which is a platform specificallly designed for this type of material).
However what you will find in LUDOS is a number of collections which specifically support the research process. 2 prime examples are:
1. The Timescapes "collection". This is an archive of primary research material (records of interviews, etc.) associated with a major longitudinal study into "the dynamics of personal relationships and identifies".
2. Virtual pathology (not yet live). A collection of virtual pathology slides from the early 20th century to provide a "rich educational and research resource of diseases".
In both cases, the explicit intention is that the materials generated through the research process should support further research activity and also be available to support student learning (both directed learning and research projects) where appropriate.
Alongside such "research"-oriented collections, there are others which have been:
1. created explicitly for student learning such as digitised music scores
2. created to support the University's internal processes such as a collection of documents to support EKT activity
3. created in order to more generally foster both research and learning/teaching (L&T) such as digitised page images of the medieval illuminated manuscripts held in the University Library.
The final report of the MIDESS project(funded by JISC and RLUK) commented in 2007 on the dangers of establishing too rigid a distinction between materials for research and for L&T within the repository context and argued strongly for a more integrated approach (http://ludos.leeds.ac.uk/midess/MIDESS-final-report.pdf p.20-21). Sadly, there has been too little evidence of that to date, at least from what I have seen.
These thoughts arose from a desire to register LUDOS with an appropriate OAI-PMH harvesting service in order to make our holdings discoverable within a national/international framework, but I am having difficulty in identifying one which is not focussed solely on research outputs. Can anybody help?
Many thanks
Michael
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Michael Emly
Collection Management Services Team Leader
Leeds University Library
tel. +44 (0)113 343 6444
email: [log in to unmask]
Postal address:
Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT
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