I got a little dubious about this morning’s preconference when I investigated its slideshow, but fortunately my fears were unfounded; it was absolutely worth my time and money.
One presenter made an offhanded remark that gave me to think furiously on many things, my own future not least: “It turned out to be cheaper to start an institutional repository than an open-access journal.”
Well. Hm. I believe that, actually, and it’s not just a question of infrastructure. It occurs to me now, as it hadn’t before, that institutional repositories are to some extent parasitic on the existing publishing process. (Only to some extent; IRs are picking up material that existing publishers can’t or won’t, for instance.) They’re running the peer review process, and they’re doing the production work.
It’s not that librarians couldn’t do this work. We surely could. But we aren’t, and that gives me to wonder how sustainable existing arrangements really are. As it is, librarians aren’t making arrangements to catalogue/index the material in their IRs. (They’re depending on authors to do it. Everyone with scholarly-publishing experience is now rolling his or her eyes. Authors, ladies and gentlemen, are wholly incompetent publishers; why should we expect them to be competent cataloguers?)
Given my choice, I’d rather helm an open-access journal than an IR. I like the IR concept, but in the long-term, we need to control more of the process than just storage. Moreover, IRs are being implemented (in my opinion) in an ill-considered, somewhat lazy fashion…
… which leads me to two jaw-dropping moments from today’s talk. One, the news that DSpace only copes with Dublin Core metadata. Purest, sheerest, madness, that. I have no major issues with Dublin Core as a brain-dead metadata-exchange format, but for native metadata on original materials, it’s hopeless, and I’m appalled that everything else is not only not supported, but actually disallowed. I sense we’ll be regretting that one in future. Heavily regretting it.
Two, the news that ProQuest has a proprietary IR “solution” and that librarians are actually buying it. Have we gone mad? We got into this mess in the first place because we bloody well let our materials, our bits and bytes, come under the economic control of commercial entities.
One of the big selling points of IRs is perpetual preservation. Maybe you trust ProQuest on that—but I don’t, and I wouldn’t touch ProQuest (or anybody else commercial; I’m not picking on ProQuest here) with a ten-foot pole unless they had an out-migration strategy ready. And probably not even then, because who’s to say that their solution will remain economically viable either for them or (especially!) for us?
Anyway, those are my scattered brain-dump thoughts on IRs. I’ve got an additional brain-dump on the keynote (which was truly excellent), but it’ll have to wait, because I’m hungry for my dinner.
Oh, speaking of which… I’m going to ditch the keynote luncheon tomorrow as a total waste of my time. (What was ACRL thinking?) Anybody who wants to ditch it with me, look for me and say so. I’ll be wearing Extreme Purple, so I should be plenty visible.
