I woke up in a ridiculously cheerful mood this morning. DSpace plus our homegrown authentication system promptly hacked up a hairball into my email, but not even that fazed me.
Then I read this, and laughed all the way across campus to my first meeting of the day. Section 3.4 of that article is purest distilled and concentrated awesomeness. It is so awesome that I am still wearing a huge grin. Go Minho!
Spoilers ho for that article—and yes, it is the kind of article that can actually have spoilers. Go read it for yourself. I’ll wait.
It starts off the way most of the “how we done it good” happytalk articles do: with The Plan. The Plan that’s going to bring faculty to the IR’s door. Orchids where they’re due; Minho doesn’t mind saying that their first tries were non-starters. A mild onion for not pointing out explicitly that all the technological enhancements that went into the service didn’t actually accomplish much—and this is only a mild onion because they obviously had stuff happening on several other fronts, so it’s hard to tease out the effects of technological enhancements from all the mandate-like action.
And then we get to section 3.4. Which is utterly golden. Excuse me, I have to go laugh some more… Right. Spoiler alert. How did Minho get its faculty depositing? Minho bribed them.
BRIBED. THEM.
I love this idea more than I can tell you. My love for it is deep and strong and so very, very full of gallows humor. It is brilliance on a stick. Utter beauty. I doff my repository-ratly cap in the direction of Portugal.
Just for a moment, let’s tease apart the pieces of this little innovation, shall we? This business about “faculty really want to self-archive, if they only knew…” yeah, not so much. Techie toys and gizmos, even (it must be said) some of the ones I think necessary and desirable, didn’t amount to a hill of beans in practice. Marketing, well, we all know that’s pointless. Training likewise; just because they know how doesn’t mean they will.
As I mentioned just the other day, the usual panacea put forward for institutional-repository ills is The Mandate. Guess what? Minho has a mandate, one of the damn few institutions that does, but they didn’t trust it to do the job. I can’t wait to see some of the commentary from the big names on that little detail. Should be amusing, in that same gallows-humor way.
But dangle a little money at ’em, and they come running. That’s beauty, that is.
I wish Minho had talked about the relative expense of the various efforts they undertook. My own guess is that the bribe pool was less expensive than the person-hours involved in creating the marketing materials and the techie toys. (Techie toys would be much less expensive if we didn’t all have to develop the same ones in parallel, but I’ve beaten that horse to death and beyond already.) So why not, for those repositories still glorying in actual budgets? If you can’t afford a flat-out bribe, a contest (with a commensurately smaller pot of money) might do nearly as well.
I’m sorry. I’m still laughing. This is just so jaw-droppingly awesome. I’m going to have to add a nod to it when I get the Roach Motel edits back.
