Caveat Lector

Earlier this year I predicted that we would see an institutional repository shut down this year, or change so much as to be unrecognizable. It hasn’t happened, to the best of my knowledge, and on the whole, I think it won’t; not this year, at any rate. Harvard has a lot to do with that, of course, but that’s not the whole story either.

One thing I’ve seen—anecdotally, but enough anecdotes as to at least suggest data—is small, non-research-focused institutions talking seriously about starting IRs. When I inquire about content recruitment, I find that the people in charge of planning the IR have drunk the self-archiving Kool-Aid. They want their faculty’s peer-reviewed literature and they’re quite convinced, despite all the evidence (not to mention my blunt warnings; one such institution had Roach Motel shoved under their noses, and is apparently still going ahead), that faculty are going to flock to this thing to give it to them.

I don’t know what to do about this that I haven’t already done. I can only bury my face in my hands and hope that somebody these poor souls will listen to (since clearly that’s not me!) buys them a clue.

These anecdotes point to the real set of questions every single institution with an IR needs to be asking itself: What content do I want from this initiative, and what am I willing to do to get it? Spoiler for this post: if the full answer to the second question is “I’m willing to run and market an IR!” please don’t start one, because that is not enough to get whatever it is that you want, and you will waste precious library resources, your people not least.

We must refocus our planning away from IRs per se and toward specific content types and the resources we’re willing to throw at acquiring, presenting, and preserving them. (Bias alert: we’re in the process of doing exactly this at MPOW, and it’s been excellently healthy for us thus far.) Doing so puts a cold hard stop to many of the problems plaguing existing IR programs: the grab-all-you-can problem caused by nervous repository-rats struggling for repository growth however they can make it happen, the unfocused-effort and unfocused-marketing problems, the “what is this thing anyway?” problem, the lonely abandoned repo-rat problem, the problem of “The IR is the solution! Now find me a problem! Uh, not that problem; I can’t actually do anything about that problem…”

Take the open-accessing of peer-reviewed literature. (Please!) Let’s say that’s our goal. It often is, although that goal has been too often hidden behind the non-goal “let’s open an IR!” The idea that making a space to put this literature in is sufficient to ensure its acquisition is dadaist absurdity. We can open an empty library building, and we can market its existence all over creation, but the mere act of doing so won’t fill the shelves! (Or worse, it will fill them with the sort of junk that people feel like donating. Come on, librarians, we all know that most donated stuff is junk!) So with IRs. “Empty attics,” anyone?

(Now, that’s actually an interesting idea. Has the “content donation” paradigm inadvertently coupled the IR with Goodwill in faculty minds and hearts—a place for stuff you don’t actually care enough about to look after yourself? Ouch, that hurts. But it seems… not entirely implausible. Ouch again. Or is it ouch? Maybe it’s opportunity? I don’t know.)

Once we focus on the stuff we want instead of the place we’re going to put it, we open up the questions we should have been asking all along. How does this stuff get produced, and how could we help produce it in a way that keeps it available to us? What happens to it when it’s done? What incentives can we offer to have it given to us, and are those sufficient to counter any opposing incentives combined with natural inertia and the actual difficulty of the task? Failing that, how do we find out about the existence of the stuff we want, and how can we then get our hands on it in the form in which we need it?

And then, at last, we can ask ourselves the elephant-in-the-room question: given the effort we’ll have to put into getting what we’ve decided we want, do we still want to go after it? “No, it’s not worth it,” is a perfectly acceptable answer to that question, to my mind; every library has to work within resource constraints. What I don’t want to see any more of, and I still see it everywhere from the small institutions I mentioned above to immense Research Is and major consortia, is ignorance of and unwillingness to engage with the elephant in the room.

I hesitate to bring this up because it cuts closer to home than I usually like to go in CavLec, but it’s important enough and I’ve gone close enough to it already that I’ll take the risk: ignoring the elephant in the room damages repository-rats most. It puts us in the impossible situation of running an unsuccessful program whose nominal goals are unclear or unreachable, with poorly-targeted resources (if any) and limited freedom of action. As time passes, the problem only snowballs, because the program’s struggles reflect poorly on the rat, making it that much harder for her to argue successfully for change or for help.

I won’t discuss actual career damage, though I suspect it may be or become a serious problem, especially for maverick managers: think a bit, and then tell me the natural career trajectory of the Innkeeper at the Roach Motel. What’s objectively becoming evident, at least, is that the self-archiving movement has been murder on repository-rats. I pointed out in Roach Motel how hard it is to find and keep them. This is one of the few situations in which I think a research survey might do some good: who are the rats, where did they come from, and where have they gone?

I’ll tell a story that mostly isn’t about me, just by way of context. I was at a repository-related meeting once where a librarian from another institution (which was on the “no-accountability” IR staffing model, for those who have read Roach Motel) suddenly began to shed unwilling tears, because as much as she believed in and worked for the repository, she just wasn’t making any headway, and nobody at her institution seemed to understand why. She was frustrated and scared, because where, after all, was the low-uptake buck going to stop if not at her desk, since she was repository booster-in-chief? She needed attention, help, understanding, and support that she obviously wasn’t getting, and in that moment, it all became too much and she broke down.

I couldn’t do much for her. I think she wanted me to tell her that if her institution went to the maverick manager model (which is the staffing model both of the places I’ve worked settled on), everything would be hunkydory. I have never been able to say that and mean it—goodness knows my own inadequate performance as a maverick manager can’t justify it—and I’m no good at that kind of fib. All I had was cold, cold comfort: this is slow and frustrating, and all you can do is your best.

I’d like to say that was the only time I’ve personally witnessed such a breakdown, but it’s not… and if I were to pile up all the frustration I’ve seen that didn’t result in tears, it would be a veritable mountain. This phenomenon feeds my strident calls for a more cohesive and effective community of practice for repository managers—if our libraries and our movement aren’t going to hear and support us, we need to find that support somewhere, or we’ll burn out. I suspect without proof that many of us have already (and I am avoiding the obvious cliché with all my strength here; the ship may be listing, but it ain’t sunk yet).

If there’s a reason that I’ve become a one-woman institutional-repository harbinger of doom over the last year or two, that is it. It’s not even the situation IRs find themselves in, as difficult as that is; existing practice demonstrates that there are ways to solve IR problems, make IRs a valued institutional property, if the will exists. The real reason is that while the problems with IRs are finally being acknowledged and openly discussed (and that is a great link that you should all click over and read), what’s still missing from the discourse is the impact that IRs’ difficult situation has had on talented, dedicated people, such as the librarian who broke down at that meeting.

Follow the labor, I said once. I still believe it. Until the open-access movement turns honest about the labor required to accomplish its real goals—notably, we’re fairly honest about gold OA and mealymouthed still about green—and acknowledges the damage it has done to the labor it’s already mustered, it can’t make a better start.