Open Access News

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Sunday, September 14, 2008

Filling, managing, and staffing IRs

Dorothea Salo, What do we want from IRs, and what are we doing to repository rats?, Caveat Lector, September 10, 2008.

Earlier this year I predicted that we would see an institutional repository shut down this year, or change so much as to be unrecognizable. It hasn’t happened, to the best of my knowledge, and on the whole, I think it won’t; not this year, at any rate. Harvard has a lot to do with that, of course, but that’s not the whole story either.

One thing I’ve seen—anecdotally, but enough anecdotes as to at least suggest data—is small, non-research-focused institutions talking seriously about starting IRs. When I inquire about content recruitment, I find that the people in charge of planning the IR have drunk the self-archiving Kool-Aid. They want their faculty’s peer-reviewed literature and they’re quite convinced, despite all the evidence (not to mention my blunt warnings; one such institution had Roach Motel shoved under their noses, and is apparently still going ahead), that faculty are going to flock to this thing to give it to them. ...

These anecdotes point to the real set of questions every single institution with an IR needs to be asking itself: What content do I want from this initiative, and what am I willing to do to get it? Spoiler for this post: if the full answer to the second question is “I’m willing to run and market an IR!” please don’t start one, because that is not enough to get whatever it is that you want, and you will waste precious library resources, your people not least. ...