Mission or missionary?
What’s an institutional repository for, anyway? That’s one of the charges set before a state-system-wide library working group I’m chairing. It’s a tough one, too. We made good headway on our other two charges (service definition and budget) at our last meeting. We didn’t get anywhere on this one.
Some IRs will claim that they’re there to collect and preserve the institution’s peer-reviewed research output. That’s the classic reason to have one at all. By that measure, I don’t know a single successful one. Not one. Not even Ohio State or Oregon. Certainly not either of the ones I’ve run.
Sometimes the above mission shades into a slightly different one: to range the institution’s faculty behind open access such that they self-archive their own work (and, it is implied, take over the scholarly publishing world, haha, mine is an evil laugh). This is the Les Carr view of IR success, in which mediated deposit is to be scoffed at because it’s a non-missionary solution. No winners there at this point, either. Not even Harvard, yet. Not even those institutions with mandates. Sure, faculty will do what they have to, but in their pointy heads they file the mandate under “one more intrusion of an out-of-control academic bureaucracy” and assign it the same dull resentment reserved for IRBs and grant progress reports. What’s more, they don’t hit the keys themselves. They delegate it to department secretaries, graduate students, librarians, and similar nonentities. Some commitment to open access that is.
The thing is, when you strip away the rhetoric, it’s quite clear that hardly any IR is set up to handle the workload either of the above missions generates. If you want all the peer-reviewed research without a mandate, you’re going to have to do mediated deposit, there’s no way around it. Number of IRs set up to do mediated deposit? A few. I do it, on a sadly small scale and without staff help. On a large scale? None. Not one. I heard Trisha Davis of Ohio State with my own two ears at NISO/PALINET, saying that she’s scared of the possibility of her small-scale mediated-deposit shop getting flooded.
As for the missionary workload involved in the second goal—look, that’s just funny, that is. Except in very small schools where the entire library (not just the repository rat) has a solid, unified commitment to open access, the kind of high-touch outreach needed to get faculty on board is not even remotely feasible. Worse still, IRs are really pathetic flags to rally anyone around, faculty or librarian. “Useless excrescences,” I called them in Roach Motel, and that’s harsh, but it’s not unfair.
And yet those are the standards against which libraries are judging repository rats. I wonder sometimes why I don’t have ulcers. I don’t wonder why my hair is graying.
Some IRs, self-aware enough to realize that both the above missions are pitifully out-of-reach (and believe you me, I resemble this remark quite strongly), redefine the IR as a service point. Come to us; we’ll take care of whatever you give us. This is the best of all possible worlds for a repository rat; at least good service is both definable and feasible. I certainly try to provide it. I’m certainly trying to move the working group in this direction (and the wording of our charges helps). The trouble here, once again, is that service isn’t a sufficient mission. Service in service of what, exactly? And round the wheel goes again, as university presses and librarians who have never been in the repository-rat trenches scoff at IRs for their meagre and non-peer-reviewed contents.
This is why I often think of IRs as preservation vehicles. Digital preservation I understand and can perform, at least as well as most and better than some. It’s also hard to argue with as a goal; it needs to be done, and who else is going to do it? It’s not as sexy as open access, but it’s unassailable. I’ll take unassailable. Everything else I do gets assailed all over the place.
A repo-rat’s life is not a simple one, not least because the tradeoffs I have just explained seem not to resonate with anyone who isn’t a repo-rat. I yell and scream and stamp my feet and make people upset at me and call myself and the service I run harsh names—because I don’t know how else to be heard, and conversations that don’t include my point of view invariably turn out to be empty and useless from where I’m sitting.