Library Journal has published “Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box” by Andrew Richard Albanese.
Excerpts:
In February 2008, the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University made history, unanimously passing a revolutionary open access mandate that, for the first time, would require faculty to give the university copies of their research, along with a nonexclusive license to distribute them electronically. In the press, Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton proudly spoke of reshaping “the landscape of learning” and fixing a damaged, overly expensive system of scholarly communication. And the very fulcrum of Harvard’s vision is a library-administered institutional repository (IR).
If Harvard’s vision portended a major role for IRs in the future, the reality today is that IRs remain largely empty, ineffective, and hobbled by everything from questions over their mission to lagging technology to the lack of meaningful institutional engagement. If they are to succeed as Harvard envisions, the next generation of IRs will require something of a reinvention—and a significantly higher level of institutional commitment.
. . .
IRs have failed to catch on for a multitude of reasons, Salo explains, not the least of which is that the first generation was hopelessly passive about their collection activities. Essentially, IRs were created as large, digital “cardboard boxes,” without any specific mission, which faculty, unrealistically, were expected simply to fill. “When that didn’t happen, when it turned out faculty wouldn’t just voluntarily deposit things, most IRs didn’t know what to do next,” Salo says.
If librarians have learned anything from the failure of IRs thus far, it is that “build it and they will come” is not a viable collection strategy, nor any way to foster the digital library of the future. The next wave of IRs, she stresses, must be reimagined around specific services that have value to faculty and can be marketed to them—and supported by an administrative mandate.
“Revisiting IRs, the question librarians will need to ask is what digital objects are important for us to collect,” Salo explains, “and then how do we go about going out and getting them.” Already, she notes, that has begun—and the trend augurs well for the future. “Some IRs opened in the last year to 18 months are avoiding their predecessors’ mistakes,” Salo says, “and in that I see the stirrings of hope.”
. . . .
Moving the next generation of IRs toward Harvard’s vision of a “digital commonwealth” will not be easy. In his SPARC closing keynote address, David Shulenberger, VP of academic affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, spoke of the dysfunction in the academy and the institutional barriers to change—from organized resistance to open access policies by publishers and scholarly societies to a lawsuit filed by two university presses against a library over e-reserves.
“We can’t afford to have those who benefit from the university environment working in ways so detrimental to it,” Shulenberger stressed. The “most effective” way forward, he suggested, are digital repositories—and he urged universities to “emulate Harvard.”
Library advocacy will play a key role in the future of IRs—but, as Salo notes, the heavy lifting is indeed an institutional burden. “The Harvard mandate is not something that can be accomplished in the library,” she notes. “That was carried out by faculty. But once you have your fire-breathing faculty, that’s where the library has to step up and say we can be the solution for this.”
