Hello,
Different academic disciplines will require a range of customised user
interfaces and facilities to be able to use repository services effectively.
The trick is to talk about repository services rather than the marketing
term 'institutional repository'. When we do this we can talk about the
services that an organisation will share and how these services will
communicate. So for example an organisation might aspire to have a single
service for authentication, authorisation, group management etc It might
implement a range of applications (DSpace, ePrints, Fedora) that use these
'coomon' services. Then it might also stipulate that any file store/ content
management system and/ or metadata management system must implement OAI to
allow the sharing of metadata between disciplines (to encourage
interdisiplinary research) and SRW/ SRU/ Z39.50 to allow federated search.
Institutional repository is a marketing term that is not useful when we are
drilling down to ask which repository services an organisation needs and
exactly what constitutes these services.
Anyone agree?
Howard Noble
University of Oxford
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bryan Lawrence" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: To do: Re: Repository content (17 Jan)
Hi Folks
> 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.
This resonated with me. I blogged about this some time ago:
http://home.badc.rl.ac.uk/lawrence/blog/2005/03/31/function_creep_and_institutional_repositories
But it's not just about software as that blog tries to say, the reality is
that once IRs go outside documents into research data, the concept of
preservation becomes a lot about having a designated user community and the
(funded) ability to keep track of their wants and requirements. No
institutional IR is ever going to be able to migrate all its e-objects, and
shouldn't pretend that it can.
Bryan
--
Bryan Lawrence
Director of Environmental Archival and Associated Research
Head of the NCAS/British Atmospheric Data Centre
CCLRC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Phone +44 1235 445012; Fax ... 5848; Web: home.badc.rl.ac.uk/lawrence
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