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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

What makes a successful repository?

Dorothea Salo, Repository tidbits, Caveat Lector, August 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

...Successful repositories have sufficient backing from their libraries and their university administrations to make something work. I can’t make it any simpler than that. Without that support, the best repository-rat in the world will not succeed. With it, you don’t need an Einstein....

Exactly what successful repositories make work varies quite a bit, according to the talents and creativity of the staff involved and the nature of the support provided. This is why it’s impossible to write the “winning recipe” for a successful IR. At Minho they instituted bribes. At Rochester back in the day, they hacked up some researcher pages. At Ohio State they have a well-established mediated-workflow system. At Harvard they’ve got a mandate....

The other thing that successful repositories have is leave and resources to experiment. They have to. The standard repository software package, as I have argued ad nauseam, is wholly inadequate to fuel a successful repository program. This means that the well-dressed repository manager has some combination of elbow room in her job description, developer time, student help, librarian alliances, and administrative weight to work with. Again, the exact combination will differ from institution to institution —but a manager without any of this might want to rewrite her résumé before her current job tarnishes it.

So much for the successful repository. Let’s talk for a moment about the typical repository...[which runs] on a wing and a prayer and the dedicated efforts of one FTE or less....