In January of 2006, the Technology Committee of the Public Library Association, the sponsor of TechNotes, decided that public libraries might have a role to play in creating and maintaining institutional repositories for the intellectual output of their communities. This TechNote investigates that question.
Underlying the concept of an institutional repository is the growing awareness that the traditional publishing model no longer meets the needs of those who seek to disseminate or access scholarly output....
A public library is itself an institution. In most cases, its staff will not produce enough scholarly output to warrant the establishment and maintenance of an institutional repository. A public library can think of itself as part of a greater whole, the community that it serves or the municipal or county government of which it is a part.
It is difficult to think of an entire community as an “institution” that a public library might seek to support with an institutional repository. Not only is a community comprised of multiple institutions, both academic and corporate, but also of many unaffiliated individuals. Clearly, a “community repository” established and maintained by a public library cannot expect to include all of the local scholarly output. For that reason, the role of the public library might be a combination of a repository and links to other repositories, thus facilitating the discovery of all publicly available scholarship, regardless of where the primary responsibility for capturing, preserving, organizing, and providing access lies. In that case, it would limit its collection to that which the other institutions do not include in their repositories.
Another option for a public library is to participate with other organizations, including libraries, to jointly develop an institutional repository. This might significantly reduce the impact on staff and budget unless the consortium seeks to define the scope of the depository much more broadly than the library would have done....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/13/2006 01:39:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
