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Lucy
Can I put in there that this reply has two serious
problems that should be identified.
Firstly, the notion that one
'institutional repository' should hold all of a university's e-objects is an
absurd one, and generally recognized by my audiences as soon as I say it. The present state of software does not support such a scheme, nor are
the characteristics of the objects anywhere near uniform. A great deal of time
and money is wasted by people who haven't yet realized this simple fact. A
university needs several ‘e-repositories’ or ‘e-libraries’,
whatever you call them.
Having said that, let's define an 'open access institutional
repository' or OA IR as one that
exists primarily to provide open access to the research output of the
university or research institution. The reasons for doing this are to (a) substantially
increase the access to and citation of published research works, and (b) have a
record of the research output; in the
o
The e-objects are
WORM (write once, read many times), just like a CD-R. Once deposited, never
modified.
o
The costs are low,
under $A10k/year plus a half-time person to manage.
o
Free good
open-source software is available, or there are commercial service providers at
reasonable prices if you don’t want to do it in-house.
o
Interworking
standards are mature and well-defined.
o
Time to
implementation can be measured in a few months.
o
Benefits are
well-defined, and quantifiable.
There are therefore very strong imperatives for establishing
an OA IR immediately if it hasn't been done already. An OA IR must hold all
published journal and conference papers, and all research higher degree theses
(which are refereed by examiners). It may (if desired) hold unpublished
research reports, book chapters, etc, but these are not essential.
All the other collections of e-objects deserve special
treatment and should not be mixed
up with the OA IR under any circumstances. I call these digital library functions. The
applications are experimental, and the software and standards are not mature. The
e-objects may be difficult to index or search (images), complex in structure
(e-publishing), highly dynamic (teaching objects), or have high archival value
and high restrictions (correspondence storage), etc. All these translate into
complex software, complex workflows, immature technology, and high costs.
Secondly, the last thing you want in
establishing an OA IR is to get bureaucracy involved. It is certainly needed to get high level executive support, and the
involvement of a Research Committee in an OA IR, but the retention tail should
not wag the OA IR dog. The facts are:
o
All published
works in an OA IR are already guaranteed to be preserved by the publishers
(journals, etc) locally and in many cases are also preserved in paper or e-copies
globally.
o
All theses are
preserved (for the present at least) in hard copy form in the libraries of the
universities.
o
All objects in an
OA IR are therefore candidates for retention only because it is nice. Not
because it is essential.
o
There is an
argument for trying to retain the ‘born-digital' objects, since paper
copies and scanned copies of paper are very poor cousins of born-digital
objects for every purpose except preservation.
Don't get me wrong here. I think that archival
retention of the contents of an OA IR is highly desirable, and my own university
(
The corollary is that retention strategies can well be
set up, but they are very definitely secondary to the main game: setting up an
OA IR and populating it with 100% of a university's research output. They
should do nothing to impede these priorities.
In summary, I couldn’t agree
less with the idea of trying to set up a catch-all repository whose first
priority is non-research data.
Arthur Sale
Professor of Computing (Research)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Lucy Burrow
> Sent: Friday, 13 January 2006 20:44
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Repository content
>
>
> If your institution has a Records Manager and a Records Management Programme
> decisions about retention of research data, published papers and administrative
> records can all be included in the retention schedule. I think to really move
> forward with instutional repositories there needs to be institutional policy
> supported by research ethics and research committees. Submission needs to be
> built into standard procedures and workflow. I think this issue is about much
> more than library staff and researcher/academics and research related data. I
> think anyone working towards institutional repositories needs to think seriously
> about getting all stakeholders on board and about some (relatively) quick wins
> in terms of content - that might not be research data...
>
> Just thoughts from discussions i've been involved in here.
> I think this new list is a great facility and look forward to further fruitful
> discussions.
>
> Lucy
>
>
>
>
> Lucy Burrow
> Records Manager
> Corporate Services
>
> McKenzie House
> 30-36
>
>
> Tel 029 20879002
>
>
> >>> Leslie Carr <[log in to unmask]> 01/12/06 9:21 am >>>
> On 11 Jan 2006, at 14:58, Sarah Kaufman wrote:
>
> > Dear all,
> >
> > Here at
> > process of setting up
> > our institutional repository. At this moment, we have yet to
> > populate the repository, and
> > have yet to establish the best ways in which to get content for the
> > repository and at the
> > same time raising awareness of the service.
>
> The SPARC Institutional Repositories Checklist and Guide (http://
> www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html ) is a venerable document.
>
> I think current best practice (this really deserves a book of its
> own!) involves an intensive and protracted engagement between library
> staff and researcher departments. I am most familiar with the efforts
> of the librarians at our own institution as part of the JISC FAIR
> "TARDis" project. See http://tardis.eprints.org/ for more details.
>
> That project involved a 2-year discussion with key representatives
> from each of the 20 schools in the University which is still
> continuing today. (It seems that you can't get away from the need for
> targeting, developing and maintaining close relationships with key
> individuals and helping them do their own advocacy.) Also, you need
> to engage with senior University management and get their support
> (and positive public statements) to make everyone take the whole
> venture seriously.
>
> I have a somewhat external view of these activities, but the key
> project personnel Pauline Simpson and Jessie Hey (cc'ed here in case
> they are not yet signed up to this list) will be able to provide more
> information.
> --
> Les Carr