Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box Repositories leapt into the national spotlight in 2008. Now what? By Andrew Richard Albanese -- Library Journal, 3/1/2009
In February 2008, the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University made history, unanimously passing a revolutionary open access mandate that, for the first time, would require faculty to give the university copies of their research, along with a nonexclusive license to distribute them electronically. In the press, Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton proudly spoke of reshaping “the landscape of learning” and fixing a damaged, overly expensive system of scholarly communication. And the very fulcrum of Harvard's vision is a library-administered institutional repository (IR). “In place of a closed, privileged and costly system,” Darnton told the New York Times, Harvard's mandate—and its IR—would lead the way toward “a digital commonwealth in which ideas will flow freely in all directions.” If Harvard's vision portended a major role for IRs in the future, the reality today is that IRs remain largely empty, ineffective, and hobbled by everything from questions over their mission to lagging technology to the lack of meaningful institutional engagement. If they are to succeed as Harvard envisions, the next generation of IRs will require something of a reinvention—and a significantly higher level of institutional commitment. That will be no easy feat, given the current economic collapse, organized publisher resistance, institutional dysfunction, rapidly changing technology, and, most beguiling, the lingering confusion about exactly what IRs are and what they can—and should—do. The end of the IR as we know it “We will see no small amount of creative destruction,” says University of Wisconsin IR manager and Caveat Lector blogger Dorothea Salo, as libraries approach the next, post-Harvard generation of IRs. “The early adopters, those who were sold on IRs by [the Coalition for Networked Information's] Clifford Lynch in 2003 and rushed in without any market research or librarywide service commitment, must now retrench or die.” IRs have failed to catch on for a multitude of reasons, Salo explains, not the least of which is that the first generation was hopelessly passive about their collection activities. Essentially, IRs were created as large, digital “cardboard boxes,” without any specific mission, which faculty, unrealistically, were expected simply to fill. “When that didn't happen, when it turned out faculty wouldn't just voluntarily deposit things, most IRs didn't know what to do next,” Salo says. If librarians have learned anything from the failure of IRs thus far, it is that “build it and they will come” is not a viable collection strategy, nor any way to foster the digital library of the future. The next wave of IRs, she stresses, must be reimagined around specific services that have value to faculty and can be marketed to them—and supported by an administrative mandate. “Revisiting IRs, the question librarians will need to ask is what digital objects are important for us to collect,” Salo explains, “and then how do we go about going out and getting them.” Already, she notes, that has begun—and the trend augurs well for the future. “Some IRs opened in the last year to 18 months are avoiding their predecessors' mistakes,” Salo says, “and in that I see the stirrings of hope.” The University of Missouri, for example, recently launched its MOSpace repository, with librarians actively soliciting and depositing materials for faculty, thus increasing their authors' web profiles. “They are avoiding several key errors of the past. They are not relying on voluntary self-archiving, nor are they dumping the repository on one hapless, powerless librarian and otherwise ignoring it,” Salo notes. “They're marketing real services to faculty.” At DePaul University, IL, IR managers are taking small bites: starting repositories with a specific project. They are essentially opening aspecial collection on St. Vincent de Paul and using that as a springboard to other things. “Eminently sensible,” Salo observes. eScholarship As the Harvard mandate would suggest, the future for repositories is skewing toward publishing services. At the University of California (UC), California Digital Library's (CDL) eScholarship repository has, in the words of a recent Association of Research Libraries task force report, been “unusually” successful. “I find the term successful fascinating when used around institutional repositories,” says eScholarship Publishing Group director Catherine Mitchell. “How do you even measure success with a repository? We have about 26,000 full-text objects in our repository. But our faculty produce 26,000 objects every year. By that measure, our numbers do not suggest we've done a good job integrating the repository into the scholarly workflow at UC.” UC is now embarking upon an initiative to establish more deeply the eScholarship repository as a suite of publishing services—not an alternative publishing system, although it is open access and is alternative—but, just simply, a better one. “There are a lot of publishing needs across the UC system that are going unmet, and we can bring better service to those individuals, departments, units, and centers, really compelling services,” Mitchell says. UC, meanwhile, has a vital ally in this endeavor—its university press, one of the finest in the country. “It's hard to make the case for institutional repositories to faculty,” Mitchell says. “We've decided we don't even want to try.” In fact, eScholarship officials are so wary of the antipathy faculty seem to feel toward institutional repositories, they are planning to ditch the term entirely. That's just fine with Salo. “Institutional repository is a horrible phrase. Please, kill it!” she says, suggesting the term seems to hearken back to the dark, early days. “It's not about 'the box' any more. We can't be talking about the box—we need to focus on all the stuff that can be in the box and the services we can offer [to faculty].” Mission drift? Not everyone, however, is convinced the new publishing mission of the IR is wise. “I may be a bit of an outlier on this, but it seems to me that IRs have become terrifically entangled with open access,” maintains one of the IR's earliest visionaries, CNI's Lynch. “I recently had cause to go back and reread my 2003 IR piece, and I hardly talk at all about OA, other than to observe that one of the many benefits of IRs is that they can facilitate OA mandates—but I consider them independent of one another.” Lynch says that the prospect of IRs as alternative publishing models for scholarly literature has left him feeling a bit queasy about the future. “I think the big, important mission for institutional repositories revolves around preserving access to underlying data and things that don't look very much like traditional publishing,” he says. “Open access is an important discussion,” he adds, but only a small slice of the role repositories must play. “The monster I see coming,” Lynch says, “is that funding agencies, like the [National Science Foundation], [National Institutes of Health], or [Andrew W.] Mellon [Foundation], are recognizing that data is an important asset that they fund and are starting to get more formal about what's going to happen to that data, where it will be preserved, where it is going to be put. As this rolls forward, faculty will want help from their institutions in satisfying the requirements of their funding organizations. Well-designed institutional repository services can be the answer there.” If Lynch is “queasy,” it's because he questions whether institutions—in particular, libraries—are biting off more than they can chew and swallow by conflating IRs with an alternative publishing mission. “I think it is short-sighted. I know many of these institutions are feeling great pain from pressure on their acquisition budgets and would like to mitigate that,” he says. “But that's a short-term economic thing, and I'm sorry to see it getting mixed up with IRs.” Roach motels If there is agreement on anything IR-related, it is that, so far, in the United States, most have flopped. “What institutional repositories offer is not perceived to be useful, and what is perceived to be useful, institutional repositories do not offer,” Salo observed in her provocative 2007 essay, “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel” (data goes in, but it doesn't come out!), an instant classic in the professional literature that incisively detailed her experience as an early adopter and IR manager. If Harvard's faculty mandate is one day remembered as a declaration of independence for scholarly research, Salo's “Roach Motel” is its unofficial preamble, setting the scene with truth after self-evident IR truth: neither the serials crisis nor open access motivates faculty to use IRs; prestige, tenure, and promotion still loom largest, as do citations, proper credit, editing, and peer review. Absent a meaningful mandate, there is little commitment of funds or staff. Much of the technology is lacking, and there is little incentive to change. Salo doesn't necessarily disagree with Lynch. IRs can—and should—serve as places for faculty to preserve and access all kinds of data. She came to IRs through the OA movement, however, and, given her experience, sees wisdom in repositories retrenching around meaningful publishing services. “It is a legitimate decision,” she says. “Sitting around and waiting for stuff to come in is not working, so becoming a publisher, offering services, and going out and getting this stuff make perfect sense.” Establishing publishing and other services would also respond to the confusion and apathy among faculty that has stymied repositories in their first generation. Most faculty simply still don't understand why they should use institutional repositories: they don't help widely disseminate work yet, or help land grant money. They don't help with tenure or promotion. In his opening keynote at the 2008 SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting in Baltimore, John Wilbanks, director of Science Commons, spoke about what would move IRs forward: incentives. “My experience is that faculty don't like to be hit with sticks,” Wilbanks said. “They prefer carrots.” The “I” in IR Moving the next generation of IRs toward Harvard's vision of a “digital commonwealth” will not be easy. In his SPARC closing keynote address, David Shulenberger, VP of academic affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, spoke of the dysfunction in the academy and the institutional barriers to change—from organized resistance to open access policies by publishers and scholarly societies to a lawsuit filed by two university presses against a library over e-reserves. “We can't afford to have those who benefit from the university environment working in ways so detrimental to it,” Shulenberger stressed. The “most effective” way forward, he suggested, are digital repositories—and he urged universities to “emulate Harvard.” Library advocacy will play a key role in the future of IRs—but, as Salo notes, the heavy lifting is indeed an institutional burden. “The Harvard mandate is not something that can be accomplished in the library,” she notes. “That was carried out by faculty. But once you have your fire-breathing faculty, that's where the library has to step up and say we can be the solution for this.” Salo says there are openings for IRs to make big strides in the coming years. “The key stumbling blocks,” she says, “are resources and will.” Author Information Andrew Richard Albanese is Editor, LJ Academic Newswire Fuente: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6639327.html?industryid=47109 _______________________________________________ Instruções para desiscrever-se por conta própria: http://listas.ibict.br/cgi-bin/mailman/options/bib_virtual Bib_virtual mailing list [email protected] http://listas.ibict.br/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bib_virtual
