Repositories, bibliographies, and CVs
Cassandra’s second problem that she thought Ulysses might help solve was the sad state of so many Basketology faculty’s home pages. Out-of-date, incomplete bibliographies (or none at all) litter her landscape, often on static pages designed sometime in the late ’90s, with all the design sense that implies.
The less work Cassandra and individual faculty have to put into keeping those pages up, the better. Cassandra doesn’t have time, and faculty don’t have inclination—faculty agree that their public face is very important, but that doesn’t mean they’ll do anything about it!
It’s no coincidence that “file-less items” are the most common newbie request to the DSpace technical lists. It’s no coincidence that Les Carr has got tens of thousands of records but only a few thousand actual files. People are trying to solve this problem, for any number of reasons!
So what to do?
There’s a pretty good argument that this is not a repository function. A repository archives documents, QED. Fine, but that doesn’t get the repository off the hook; the repository should be providing data for these pages and reports at the very least. RSS feeds are nice for updating this sort of information, and a lot of repositories offer feeds already, so that’s a start.
But one more time, RSS is not enough. For Cassandra and the Basketology faculty, it’s too hard and it doesn’t do enough. Cassandra and Dr. Troia want an up-to-date list generated on-the-fly whenever somebody hits one of the faculty websites. And they want that list to live in their webspace, not Ulysses’s. Dr. Troia would be thrilled to pieces if she could also come by a neatly-formatted word-processed list for her annual activity report.
In Achaea’s ideal world, I think, the repository (or, for repository purists, a service overlaid on it) would track faculty publication activity, including materials not deposited in the repository. If this service were BibApp-y, it would be able to derive at least some of this information from RSS search feeds from appropriate electronic article databases. There would then be a Javascript include gizmo (not unlike Feed2JS) that would kick back a nicely-formatted HTML listing, based on a RESTful API that more ambitious programmers could do more ambitious things with.
The respectful repository or overlay service also offers COinS to play nice with Zotero. (I’m working on this for Manakin; haven’t gotten it quite together yet. I still hate OpenURL with an all-consuming passion.) I don’t know offhand what is needed for repositories to play nicely with (*spit*) RefWorks, but whatever it is, it’s worth doing. Both of these are steps on the way to Dr. Troia’s nicely-formatted annual activity report, although the adventurous Achaean programmer should learn to write out RTF and ODF—yes, unfortunately both.
Most of this isn’t hard. Why haven’t we done it yet?