I cannot take entire credit for the insight in this post. It came out of a three-hour meeting today on the topic of research computing....
The natural constituency of institutional repositories as they are generally envisioned is the STM world —scientific, technical, medical. That’s where the serials crisis is most acute. That’s where funders are starting to mandate open access to research results and the underlying data used to generate them. That’s where the digital revolution in scholarly communication has made the most progress.
That’s also the group least invested in academic libraries, especially in their traditional image as The Book Barn....
[S]urveys have shown that because the access technology is the same —that is, the web browser— [these users] simply cannot distinguish between a resource on the free web and a resource that their libraries have paid dearly for....Books? They don’t use books. The OPAC? Is irrelevant to them, because they don’t use books. Reference service? They don’t use it much if at all, and (as a rule) they don’t send their students to it. Instruction? Typically has the least penetration into these disciplines....
These researchers do not see the library, do not go to the (physical) library, do not care about the library, do not think about the library. So insofar as institutional repositories are a library service (and as I have repeated ad infinitum, they are that nearly everywhere they exist, at least in the United States), they are just as invisible as every other library service....
The arts and humanities tell a different tale. The library is a major locus of arts and humanities research, with librarians a major part of the faculty’s working lives, both as scholars and as teachers. This means in practice that librarians often play a key role in introducing arts and humanities faculty to technologies that can help them —...yes, [including] the institutional repository....
I need to think about this situation some more before I can formulate a coherent response to it. My first impression, though, is to follow an instinct I’ve had for a while and market to STM departments’ local IT staff, who are both less contemptuous of the library than those they serve and more likely to see the IR as a solution to genuine problems they have.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/18/2007 10:53:00 AM.
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.
