A, B, and C
Required reading for repository-rats and all who love them: Palmer et al.’s investigation into institutional-repository methods and results. Given how rarely I praise research in this area, not to mention how often I complain bitterly about it, I hope my unalloyed praise for this report holds weight. It’s well-written, it’s well-supported, and it’s right in all the important ways. Like Margaret Henty’s article, which I have also had occasion to praise, it’s useful; I learned things I hadn’t known but have no trouble believing from it, and I’m an old dog as this field goes.
If you’re in the business, you can figure out pretty quickly who at least two of the three studied institutions are. (I’m still a little fuzzy on A, though I have a strong suspicion, but I know beyond a doubt who B and C are.) None of them, in case anyone is wondering, is MPOW, so I’m not feathering my own nest here.
Money quotes:
In general, the basic aims of universities in investing in IRs—to collect, preserve, and provide access to their research output—seem misleadingly simplistic compared to what IRs are actually attempting to accomplish, and what they will need to do to identify and successfully implement functions that are not redundant or risky and of high value to faculty.
This is exceedingly well-phrased, and it gives me to ponder somewhat about how I characterized the tension between repository-rats and other librarians (including but not limited to library administrators) in Roach Motel. Faced with a “basic aim” that is impossible to accomplish, repository-rats naturally nose about for other problems to solve (and the report makes that strategy quite clear, addressing its benefits and drawbacks even-handedly). I think I have traduced my ratly colleagues and myself in Roach Motel by expressing this process purely in terms of nervous rats seeking job security and self-justification, and I’m sorry for that.
The truth is, I want to be useful. We all do, all of us rats, even if not everyone is exactly like me in usefulness being a fundamental work drive, what gets me out of bed in the morning. If we can’t be useful in IRs’ “basic aim,” and often we can’t for reasons well outside our control (this being a major theme of Roach Motel), we actively look for other problems, do our best to make ourselves useful in other ways. These problems fall almost exclusively outside IRs’ supposed “basic aim,” which naturally confuses other librarians.
The intellectual property (IP) obstacles involved in populating IRs consumed significant amounts of time and resources and can be a drain on other core development activities.
No argument here. IP is a swamp, and it’s not a swamp that most IR planning processes anticipated. The report’s discussion of how faculty and IR staff build boardwalks through the swamp is trenchant and well worth reading.
Unlike other aspects of repository building, liaison networks with faculty were already a functioning part of library operations and are now serving as essential human infrastructure in IR development.
While the subject orientation of liaisons is being exploited in IR development, there seems to be much less application of their experience in collection development, management, and evaluation—areas of expertise that are highly relevant but need to be revised for the IR collection model.
Liaison librarians are essential to a well-functioning IR, and their essential-ness is most of why the maverick-manager and no-accountability staffing models are often anti-patterns. I didn’t make this clear in Roach Motel, and I now think that was another goof-up on my part. The key, as I hope I did make clear, is library administrators setting clear and realistic goals related to the IR for all their staff: repository-rats, liaisons, cataloguers, and others alike.
I tend to be a little bit more of the traditional librarian, because I don’t know TEI, and I don’t know SHTML. [I suspect that should have been 'XHTML,' and that the error was in transcription rather than originating from the librarian interviewed.] I don’t know XML. But, it’s pushed me to try to understand that a little bit better. … But what I see happening is … and actually over at the library itself, is this beautiful combination of understanding the structure of information, and understanding the code that goes behind it, and how to make it usable to the people who want to access it.
Liaison 15, whoever you are, I salute you as a valued and respected colleague! I will be quoting you to my LIS 644 students, because you are an exemplary librarian. If we ever turn up at the same conference, please introduce yourself; the drinks are on me.
Perhaps most important to the viability of IRs, however, were those [faculty] who found that the IR solved a particular information problem they faced in the everyday practice of scholarship.
I said something quite like this pretty bluntly in Roach Motel. I’m pleased to see it supported, because I could only assert it, not back it up.
Digitization was seen as a productive correlate service.
I said that, too, and I stand by it. The analog-digital divide is not something I made up. The tension comes in, I think, because digital librarianship’s usual careful, meticulous digitization and description methods cannot function here; there’s just too much material. Archivists’ “more product less process” epiphany may well be the way forward.
Depositors and liaisons alike commented on how many faculty members could not differentiate between open access scholarship and scholarship that was available through the library.
Open-access movement, this is to your address, I think. You haven’t made that nearly clear enough, and it’s a problem. What did I say once? Oh yes, this, in the context of e-reserves quarrelling: “We have to draw a thick black line connecting what faculty do and what they have access to, because right now they don’t see it.”
I can’t pull quotes from the faculty members, because everything the report quotes from them and about them is so good and so right and so real. I’ve had all those conversations before, every last one of them.
Policy and criteria-based selection and evaluation are not typical. Instead, developers have been quick to capture collections not encumbered by copyright constraints, offering access to a growing base of local technical reports, grey literature, and theses and dissertations.
This squares with my experience, and is a logical outgrowth of “basic aim” failure combined with the IP swamp. The only thing I can add is that I believe it would take a heavy load off many repository-rats’ minds if realistic selection criteria and priorities could be made explicit, such that in pulling together local tech reports, grey-lit, and ETDs (not to mention datasets), we’re confidently fulfilling our mandate instead of cautiously creeping outside it wondering what will happen to us when we get caught. Another positive outcome would be a realistic reassessment of just how much work it takes to capture peer-reviewed material legally, and resource provision to match.
By the way, any resemblance of the title of this post to an excellent episode of The Prisoner is purely intentional, ’cuz I’m just too much of a geek for that not to tickle my funny-bone (… connected to the…).