On all cylinders
I beat the snow home yesterday by an hour or so. Travel was travel: lengthy, occasionally annoying, but generally uneventful.
The NISO/PALINET workshop was sold out, packed to the gills. I was fair shocked, after hearing one librarian say at ASIST that her boss had said “No, I don’t want one of those institutional repositories—they all fail.”
NISO is going to put up both slides and talk video, and I wholeheartedly recommend taking a look when they do, because saving my presence, every single presenter was firing on all cylinders. (I got in at 11 the night before, was up at 5, and survived the day fueled by sugar, caffeine, and indignation.) I’ll keep an eye out and link the stuff here when it becomes available. I also want to say that NISO has the best licensing agreement I have ever seen; it was a pleasure to sign it!
When I got home, I took the opportunity to glance through Peter Suber’s annual predictions list. I am going to disagree slightly with one of his predictions and add another that I doubt he would make.
I do not think that there will be significantly more open-access institutional repositories in the United States at the end of 2008 than there are today. This is only a slight disagreement with Peter Suber, because he didn’t specify IRs, just open-access repositories, and there likely will be a few more of those, especially outside the States. I also think that if, as Suber suggests, self-archiving hits the tipping point once we get an NIH mandate and a few mandates like it, institutional repositories will not be winners. Nothing will counteract scholars’ natural gravitation toward their disciplines.
I also predict that there will be at least one high-profile IR failure in the United States before the end of 2008. The exact form of this failure I’m not sure about. It could be an outright closure, which will touch off a furious debate about repository succession planning that we really should have had years ago. It could be a more graceful handoff, or a consolidation into a consortial repository. It could be a major defunding; the repository’s materials will remain accessible, but staff time and money thrown at the repository will be reduced significantly or eliminated. (I add that this is most likely at schools that have zero to one dedicated repository-rats, rather than a team-based IR program involving digitization, mediated deposit, meaningful copyright assistance, software hacking, and all that good stuff. But most IRs have zero to one dedicated repository-rats, so I haven’t excluded much.)
But I’ll stake my reputation that it’ll happen. To be fair, I eliminate any repository I’ve ever been involved with, numbering at least three at last count, from consideration—insider knowledge shouldn’t matter. And as is the way of these things, one high-profile failure really means ten more that nobody noticed. I’d predict that too, except I don’t have a terribly good way of finding out whether I’m right.
Look, it’s simple. Institutional repositories are money pits, and the returns are negligible. The cost-per-item-archived is absurd. Libraries may be idealistic, but they’re not stupid, and they do move on from failed experiments, especially when those experiments have a heavy technology component.
After my talk on Monday, which I admit was caustic, one person came up to me and asked why the heck I was still in this business if I was so bearish on it! Well… that’s a good question, and I won’t deny that I have spent a lot of this year wondering whether what I’m doing is viable in the long or even the short (one to three years) term.
Here’s the thing. I agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Dillon that this business of gathering and storing and curating digital materials is not going away. And that’s the sort of work that I get a personal kick out of. And right now, barring a few specialized data-librarian positions, repository work is as close as I can get.
I do think that will change. MPOW has a cyberinfrastructure initiative; I’m involved in it on behalf of the library. But that initiative isn’t being led by the library; it’s being led by central IT. That may well be where my future is, because one thing is crystal-clear: IR platforms as they currently exist and as I see them developing cannot serve the expressed and anticipated needs. Cannot. CANNOT.
Don’t throw RepoMMan and Monash University at me, either. Yes, they are a lot closer to what I envision as necessary. But they are out of reach for most academic libraries in the United States; yea, even many Research Is. Most of these libraries with their half-a-cylinder IT capacity can’t even do anything in DSpace that doesn’t come out of the box, okay? And when I think about throwing DSpace at serious cyberinfrastructure problems, I’m sorry, it’s completely risible. I laugh. And I scoff. And I quietly fume, because DSpace is what I’m stuck with whether I like it or not—and I don’t.
Moreover, libraries (with a few notable exceptions, e.g. Ohio State) mostly don’t have a viable service model for this work yet, and some of what I’ve heard lately, including on Monday at the workshop, makes me despair that one is coming. After Peter Murray’s utterly brilliant talk on intervention in digital workflows as the “fourth wave” of library work (er, that was a spoiler, wasn’t it? oh well), an audience member asked with a certain amount of Gormanesque hauteur whether intervening in faculty digital workflows was really consonant with the library mission, since after all, we deal in authoritative, quality-controlled information, don’t we.
Peter’s answer was great, and I won’t spoil it (watch the video when it’s out!); I will merely add that if this is our work, and I believe large swathes of it are, we have a small and shrinking window of opportunity to get in on the plans being made and the resulting services that will be offered. If we turn up our noses because the information our faculty churn out every day isn’t good enough for us, IT will take up the banner and disrupt us right off the playing field.
And in fact, I’m decidedly worried that is exactly what will happen. That’s our lunch, there. It’s getting eaten. We’re not only not at the table, we’re hardly even in the restaurant. And IRs? Barely even fit on the same block. Consider the librarian at ASIST I mentioned. Consider the effects when my prediction comes true and a big IR folds. How likely do you think it is that libraries will take up a vastly larger project than an IR, with much more nebulous goals and means, once they decide (as I believe they will) that IRs burned them?
I would love to be patient, as Suber suggests I do. Unfortunately, if we’re going to keep even enough preservation infrastructure (by which I chiefly mean librarians engaged with these issues and employed specifically to deal with them) to start addressing digital collection and preservation in libraries, I just don’t think I can afford to be patient. My New Year’s resolution for 2008 is already made: yell about all this, yell loudly, and yell a lot until important decisionmakers actually start listening.
I may blow out a cylinder or two. But it’s necessary.