Their own voices
I am reading through the repository case-studies that Les Carr put together for the Open Repositories ’08 conference. I strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in institutional repositories at least skim.
This is the real deal, folks. Real repository-rats running real repositories dealing with real problems and achieving real successes, speaking in their own voices unmediated by discourses of fear or open-access dogma. Stop hanging on every word from the Big Thinkers. This is where the action is. These are the people I was trying (in my stumbling fashion) to speak for when I wrote Roach Motel.
Themes I saw:
- The library running the repository deposits most of the content, be it content from faculty/researchers or library-generated content. Unmediated faculty/researcher deposit is a pipe dream.
- Faculty and researchers haven’t heard of the repository qua repository, even the ones who use it. (This is identical to their behavior faced with library-purchased electronic resources. That the library is involved, that there’s a service involved, with people behind it, just doesn’t register with them.)
- Running open-source repository software is a hassle.
None of this should surprise anyone… and yet it will, I’m sure.
My personal thanks to all the people who wrote case studies. Keep writing, please! Write, and speak, and represent. We can’t progress until we have a fair, truthful sense of where we are, and to get there we have to hack through a right jungle of obfuscatory rhetoric and unjustifiable happytalk.
Also, I owe Les Carr an apology; he offered me a sneak peek at these in return for my reactions, and I never did get back to him. I couldn’t be happier that these have a good home.