Meet Dr. Troia
I’ve been rereading Alan Cooper. This is dangerous; it makes me want to create personas. So, herewith, a portrait of a potential institutional-repository user, Dr. Helen Troia of the Department of Basketology at Achaea University. Dr. Troia is a fabrication based partly on my own observations and experience, partly on the heinous amounts of reading I have done in the literature about faculty publication behaviors and attitudes, and partly on focus groups done at MPOW for the BibApp and a local scholarly-asset-management study group.
Dr. Troia goes up for tenure next year. She is hard at work on three peer-reviewed journal articles in various states of completion: one is still in draft, one was just accepted for publication, and one is sitting on her desk awaiting her review of the copyedits. She will be the first to tell you that she doesn’t keep very good track of her computer files. If asked to find a file from her first published paper five or six years ago, she probably couldn’t—after all, she was still a doctoral candidate at Troy Tech then!
She knows that her tenure approval will depend on the prominence of the journals her work is published in. Basketology tenure committees do look at post-publication measures such as impact factors and citation rates, but when the rubber meets the road, publication numbers and journal prestige are what count. Although they use electronic resources heavily, Basketology faculty (especially more senior faculty) look somewhat askance at electronic-only journals, a fact of which Dr. Troia is well aware. As for popular basketology, well! faculty are supposed to engage in discourse with other serious researchers, not with the ignorant public.
Dr. Troia is a fan of Achaea University’s library; as far as she is concerned, she has access to all the literature she needs, thanks to her department’s excellent collection-development librarian. She is aware that the library has been cancelling journals, and has spoken up in the faculty senate for better library funding, but she hasn’t paid attention to the nitty-gritty details. She does not often go to the physical library building; in fact, the library rarely impinges on her consciousness as a researcher, although she does take advantage of bibliographic instruction by librarians for her classes.
Dr. Troia’s basketology data, which are unique and could not be recreated if they were to disappear, live on the computer in her office. This computer is not to her knowledge backed up. Dr. Troia doesn’t want to put data on the department’s shared network drive, because she isn’t sanguine about its security, and her data are vital to her professional advantage, not to be pawed over by just anyone. Some of her older data are in a file format her current software can’t open; Dr. Troia shrugs about that—it’s just how software works, and she has a workaround (though a tedious and annoying one) for any file she absolutely must get into.
Dr. Troia signs whatever publication agreements are put in front of her. The important thing for her career is getting her work into the right places. She has no idea how copyright gets swapped around, and isn’t sure why she should care, since she has no choice but to accept publisher agreements if the publications her career depends upon are to happen. She might file her publication agreements away, but she isn’t sure where they’d be or if she threw them out in her last fit of office-decluttering.
Open access? Dr. Troia looks puzzled. Isn’t that for software? She doesn’t do computational basketology. Oh, putting her work on the Web? Well, isn’t it there already? She can go to her computer at work and download her own articles, though when she’s at home she has to sign in. Oh, openly? Doesn’t that violate copyright? Well, yes, I suppose some of my colleagues do have their papers on their departmental websites. That’s good enough, isn’t it? Why does there need to be another place?
Oh, says Dr. Troia. I didn’t know the library did that. Can I use it for syllabi? What about the draft I’m working on? Oh, just finished work. Just research. Well, it sounds like a nice idea, but I’m very busy and I don’t see much benefit in it for myself. I just don’t have time to go through hard drives and old floppy disks for my old work, and I’m sure if I did one of my publishers would get angry with me. Citation advantage? Well, okay, but my committee won’t pay much attention to putting work anyplace that’s not peer-reviewed—and besides, if it’s in the right journals everyone who really needs to will see it.
What about my students’ work, though? That might be good. Theses and dissertations, yes! But my own work? Mine?
Well, why would I want my own work in the same place as my students’?