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Monday, March 10, 2008

NISO may recommend IR deposit tool and standards

Thought Leader Meeting on Institutional Repositories Proposes Common Deposit Mechanism Tool, NISO Newsline, March 2008.  Excerpt:

A portion of the 2007 Mellon grant received by NISO was designated to proactively foster new standards activities through a series of "Thought Leader" meetings, where a group of experts on a particular topic convene to identify potential areas for NISO to lead a standards-based or recommended practice solution to recognized barriers.

Participants in the first Thought Leader meeting, held February 12 on the topic of Institutional Repositories, were Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (University of Houston), Catherine Candee (California Digital Library), Sayeed Choudhury (Johns Hopkins University), Paul Curran (Bournemouth University), Teresa Ehling (Cornell University), James Hilton (University of Virginia), Michele Kimpton (DSpace Federation), Larry Lannom (CNRI), and Rob Tansley (Google).

In a pre-meeting conference call, the group contemplated the pain points that are blocking deeper and wider adoption of institutional repositories....

At the meeting on February 12...[t]here was a collective belief that scholars have resisted institutional repositories at least in part due to the duplication of effort that depositing one's electronic content typically involves. The group strongly advocated investigation of a solution that renders the incremental cost of depositing across multiple domains virtually zero....

The group proposed that a NISO working group develop a common deposit mechanism "tool" that would allow institutional repositories to capture objects as close to their creation point as possible. The capture of these objects should be part of a larger context that will allow for their exposure across a variety of domains, such as journals, subject matter repositories, and course management systems. Commercial versions of the tool might offer advanced functionality, such as deposit destination suggestions and rights management guidance. Content destinations from the different domain areas could make themselves eligible to receive the exposed objects by adhering to the developed standard or protocol. NISO could facilitate a common deposit pilot project for the protocol and, subsequently, the deposit process could be opened to any entities that adhered to the NISO-developed standard.

The NISO Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee will be reviewing the IR Thought Leader groups' recommendations and refining a working group charter....