This handbasket
I find myself wondering why libraries opened institutional repositories.
Wait, I should qualify that. I know why European and Australian libraries opened them. I’m confused about the States.
There are isolated cases of a request coming from academic administration, but my understanding is that for the most part, libraries took up the idea on their own. Opening an IR can’t be done on the grassroots level, so somebody convinced a lot of top library administrators that this was a good idea.
Who? How? And what did the library admins think they were going to get out of the deal?
I wasn’t there in the early days; I was just entering library school when Cliff Lynch wrote the infamous “essential infrastructure” piece. I don’t know these things. As much as I hate asking for more goofy library research, this is a research question I’d like to see answered. The results have implications for how IRs get out of the mess that they’re in.