I’ve uploaded the talk I gave last week at Digital Humanities 2009, “Library as Agent of [Re]Contextualization.” Its text is here [PDF], and the slides are available on SlideShare.
Archive for the ‘digital repositories’ Category
DH09 Thursday, session 1: libraries!
Thursday, June 25th, 2009The first paper was mine; naturally, I’m not going to blog it. But I’ll post a link to a PDF version of my talk here, and will Tweet it too. Stay tuned.
DH09 Wednesday, session 1: managing information
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009First up, Melissa Terras of University College London. “Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitization”
Melissa has spent a lot of time studying images, and in most cases was studying images in/from institutions. But what about collections (of all sorts, not just images) created by people who aren’t affiliated with institutions? They’re actually quite interesting, and Melissa studied them using the following methods:
DH09 Tuesday, session 2: Supporting the Digital Humanities: Putting the Jigsaw Together
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009[OK, not putting information copied from slides in quotes: no time. Thank you, panelists, for concise wording in your slides! If you want specific attribution, let me know.]
The big questions to be addressed by the panelists, as Martin Wynne proposes in his introductory remarks:
1. What specific problems have you identified, and how are you seeking to address them?
2. What services, if any, will you provide?
3. How might you link with other related initiatives?
4. What are the further elements of the jigsaw puzzle which are needed to create a coordinated and more complete research infrastructure?
(more…)
BU STH materials make their way onto archive.org
Friday, June 19th, 2009Here at the School of Theology Library, we’ve been digitizing our Missions collection—for now, just what’s out of copyright. Student assistants Christina (Mo) Geuther and Carolyn Frantz have been working tirelessly, and we’re starting to see results. Exciting! And more on the way.
Elsevier gets sneaky
Friday, June 19th, 2009The large and influential academic publisher Elsevier seems to have quietly changed its publication agreement. From the sample agreement [PDF link]:
Assignment of publishing rights
I hereby assign to <Copyright owner> the copyright in the manuscript identified above (government authors not electing to transfer agree to assign a non-exclusive licence) and any supplemental tables, illustrations or other information submitted therewith that are intended for publication as part of or as a supplement to the manuscript (the “Article”) in all forms and media (whether now known or hereafter developed), throughout the world, in all languages, for the full term of copyright, effective when and if the article is accepted for publication. This transfer includes the right to provide the Article in electronic and online forms and systems. No revisions, additional terms or addenda to this Agreement can be accepted without our express written consent. Authors at institutions that place restrictions on copyright assignments, including those that do so due to policies about local institutional repositories, are encouraged to obtain a waiver from those institutions so that the author can accept our publishing agreement. (Emphasis mine.)
So, first they imply that institutions with institutional repositories restrict their faculty’s publishing opportunities by placing “restrictions on copyright assignments.” Not true: most institutions aim to educate their faculty about copyright and make sure that their researchers don’t sign away all rights in perpetuity without knowing exactly what they’re doing. It’s understandable that Elsevier wouldn’t like this, as they want exclusive copyright on work they didn’t perform (though, to be fair, are publishing).
Then Elsevier encourages authors to opt out of an enterprise that is proving to be a significant boon to academics (first and foremost providing them with visibility), implying that this is required for the authors to accept Elsevier’s apparently immutable publishing agreement. No contract is immutable before it is signed, but the language here does strongly suggest this, counting on most people just going along with it because they are unaware, or because they want to publish and don’t have time to pursue this with Elsevier.
It’s true that the very next paragraph, and its continuation later in the document, have different implications:
Retention of Rights for Scholarly Purposes (see Definitions below)
I understand that I retain or am hereby granted (without the need to obtain further permission) rights to use certain versions of the Article for certain scholarly purposes, as described and defined below (“Retained Rights”), and that no rights in patents, trademarks or other intellectual property rights are transferred to the journal.The Retained Rights include the right to use the Pre-print or Accepted Authors Manuscript for Personal Use, Internal Institutional Use and for Scholarly Posting; and the Published Journal Article for Personal Use and Internal Institutional Use. [...]
[definition of scholarly posting] Voluntary posting by an author on open Web sites operated by the author or the author’s institution for scholarly purposes, or (in connection with Pre-prints) pre-print servers, provided there is no Commercial Purpose involved. Deposit in or posting to Special Repositories (such as PubMed Central) is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository and only consistent with Elsevier’s policies concerning such repositories. If the author wishes to refer to the journal in connection with such posting, the Appropriate Bibliographic Citation should be used.
Further confusing: a scholar may post pre-prints to the websites that fit the italicized definition above, which would seem to include institutional repositories. Except Elsevier mentions repositories twice, and both in a permission-denied context: the second one is the Special Repositories such as PubMed.
Seems like language designed to mislead and bully, to me. Elsevier, would you please clarify?
Limited spaces still available at the DigCCurr Professional Institute at Chapel Hill
Thursday, April 9th, 2009Got this through a list:
DigCCurr Professional Institute: Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle
June 21-26, 2009 & January 6-7, 2010 (One price for two sessions)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Visit the institute’s site for more information and to register.
The institute consists of one five-day session in June 2009 and a two-day follow-up session in January 2010. Each day of the June session will include lectures, discussion and a hands-on “lab” component. A course pack and a private, online discussion space will be provided to supplement learning and application of the material. An opening reception dinner on Sunday, break time treats and coffee, and a dinner on Thursday will also be included.
This institute is designed to foster skills, knowledge and community-building among professionals responsible for the curation of digital materials.
SPARC 2008 Videos
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009The videos from the SPARC 2008 Digital Repositories meeting have been posted:
DuraSpace
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009One of the issues faced as we think about launching our open access initiative / institutional repository at BU is anticipating how to deploy at an enterprise level the hardware and software that have been running on the Theology Library’s server. Trying to anticipate the data storage requirements in the first year, third year, etc. is difficult. DuraSpace provides an attractive alternative. The collaboration between DSpace and Fedora Commons was discussed in a recent Sun in Education webinar:
DSpace and Fedora: A Collaboration Update
>> Click here to listen now
>> Click here to download .pdf file
The ability to store the data in a “cloud” could ease the load on IT for deployment, configuration, and support of hardware to support what could be massive storage needs. It would also have the advantage of distributing the data, and making it available for data-mining in ways we have not imagined…
BU OA: reactions so far
Thursday, February 19th, 2009Well! The news of BU’s adoption of an open access plan has spread far and wide. It’s been picked up by DigitalKoans, by the Associated Press, and by Inside Higher Ed among others. Peter Suber’s thoughtful response was one of the first, supplemented by further thoughts after the university published the document approved by the Faculty Council last September.
Institutional repository manager and librarian Dorothea Salo (University of Wisconsin) wrote an interesting post in which she characterizes BU’s initiative as something hybrid compared to what’s gone before. She writes:
It is not a mandate of any kind. It is not a typical rights-retention resolution, either; there is no author addendum attached. Instead, it is a fascinating middle-ground. It mentions gold as well as green OA. It mentions building a faculty publications database, not just an IR; this is important because like it or not, faculty publications databases have real-world uses for faculty and administrators that IRs simply don’t. It takes on tenure and promotion practices straightforwardly.
It is, in short, a start toward a university-wide open-access strategy. That’s fascinating, and to the best of my knowledge, completely novel. The breadth of the conversation is certainly a vast improvement over the library starting an IR all by itself that it then doesn’t promote or work to fill. It’s also an improvement over putting all the local open-access eggs in one basket, whether that basket is an IR or an author’s addendum or a gold-fee fund. Several open-access strategies are still in experimental stages… I think it makes an awful lot of sense to keep one’s implementation options open, focusing on policy and hearts-and-minds instead. [emphasis author's]
Salo’s comments seem to me partly descriptive, partly suggestive of where we might want to place emphasis as we work on making this thing a reality. Certainly worth discussing, as I’m sure we will.
BU’s OA document
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009Here (PDF) is the document that describes BU’s current thinking on open access, and what we’re doing about it. Linked here is the version approved by the Faculty Council last September. We welcome and invite constructive feedback on this work in progress.
(Please note: I personally am involved in this project, but am acting more or less as the messenger. I will be unlikely to answer specific questions having to do with policy; other people monitoring this post, however, may be more useful. We’ll be discussing whatever comments we receive amongst ourselves, so if there is no overt reply, please be assured that your input is not only valuable but actively being included in the process.)
BU takes step toward open access
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009We’re go! University Council Approves Open Access Plan, BU Today, 17 Feb 2009:
Boston University took a giant step towards greater access to academic scholarship and research on February 11, when the University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit. [...]
“This vote sends a very strong message of support for open and free exchange of scholarly work,” says [University Librarian Robert] Hudson. “Open access means that the results of research and scholarship can be made open and freely accessible to anyone. It really has increased the potential to showcase the research and scholarship of the University in ways that have not been evident to people.”
Of course, we’ll need to be implementing this, which is no trivial matter—just ask Dorothea Salo and the many, many other institutional repository managers out there. And BU is very aware of this:
“Open access will really highlight the tremendous productivity of our faculty,” says [MED professor of medicine Barbara] Millen. “Among the more important things needed to make it work is a collaboration between the libraries and our faculty to get their research onto the Web. It’s not an inconsequential task.”
Yep, they sure know it’s going to take a large amount of resources—and it looks like the university is willing to put in the effort to do this right. It’s a fantastic thing to be part of.
Any repository folk who happen to read this, please share your wisdom and the appropriate warnings. It’ll be a long (exciting!) haul.
Digging into Data Challenge
Friday, January 16th, 2009A new announcement from large funding agencies out of several countries:
The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.
What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?
Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference. Our hope is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field.
The full Request for Proposals is available here. (PDF) Deadline for a letter of intent is March 15th; deadline for final applications, July 15th.
An introduction to Creative Commons licensing
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008Created by Jesse Dylan, this brief video provides an introduction to Creative Commons licensing. For more information, go to:
[video http://blip.tv/file/get/Commonscreative-ASharedCulture247.mov]
A Science Commons
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008Jesse Dylan’s short video about Science Commons provides a good rationale for archiving scientific data in a location that makes it available to other scientists. It would be interesting to make similar arguments for other disciplines. Humanities? Social Sciences?
[local /wp-content/uploads/2008/12/commonscreative-sciencecommonsjessedylan763.mov]
SPARC 2008: Campus Publishing Strategies
Thursday, December 4th, 2008The program said this about the last three-paper session of the conference: “Digital repositories are part of a set of emerging publishing functions on many campuses. Campus publishing activities are becoming increasingly collaborative as libraries partner with departments, campus I.T., university presses, other campuses, and third-party organizations such as scholarly societies. The recent Ithaka-sponsored report on “University Publishing in a Digital Age” encourages the development of “university publishing strategies” for a more strategic approach to disseminating the work of faculty and staff, and the reinstatement of publishing as an activity that is mission-critical to the academic ambitions of every institution. Campuses that have not traditionally thought of themselves as “publishers” must grapple with the shifting definition of that term, while university presses and other dedicated publishers struggle to articulate the value of their traditional services in a tight marketplace. [...]”
The session was one on lessons learned in three very different higher-ed environments.
1. Rea Devakos, Coordinator of Scholarly Communication Initiatives, University of Toronto
“Building in Uncertain Times: News from the Great White North”
UT is running the ScholarsPortal project, which “allows you to query nearly 23 million references to scholarly journal articles from over 50 major index and abstract databases through a single search – it’s like a Google search of scholarly information sources.”
As you might expect, contributions of constituent databases for this portal, which covers all of Ontario, may vary greatly. Collaborator institutions are expected to have varied areas of focus, history of tech use and platforms, but they should all be comfortable working remotely. Lean production environments are a usual occurrence, so information flows must be well managed. And yet, the structure of the umbrella project must be lightly enough structured to accommodate the different contributors and their different levels of commitment.
2. Catherine Mitchell, Director, eScholarship Publishing Group, California Digital Library, University of California
“Let’s Stop Talking About Repositories: A Study in Perceived Use-Value, Communication and Publishing Services”
Let’s reframe the conversation away from repositories, and think about what makes an IR successful. Take the eScholarship repository: many deposits, MANY full-text downloads of content. So by those markers, it’s been successful. On the other hand, UC faculty system-wide generate ~26,000 publications a year, so by comparison, maybe the IR is not so successful.
Why the gap? Lack of visibility and lack of incentive.
Publishing needs at UC boil down to these broad categories:
- low budget journals;
- conference proposals and proceedings;
- working papers, previously published materials;
- disciplinary and departmental collections;
- faculty homepages, annual publication reports; and
- innovative digital scholarly publications.
So, maybe we should stop talking about the concept of repository and focus on publishing services provided, and their relevance to researchers. The IR deposit becomes a by-product of services rendered, rather than an end in itself.
So Mitchell’s publishing group conducted a marketing and outreach campaign, redesigned the access interface, and began collaborating more closely with UC Press. The marketing allowed them to build a network; they acquired an outreach and marketing coordinator and e-scholarship liaisons, and recruited local site administrators to help spread the word. They customized their message, responding to cultural differences among disciplines. They addressed the incentives and risks for ladder rank faculty at different career stages. And they also considered what Mitchell called unique challenges around interdisciplinary and disciplinary formation.
They paid attention to their communication strategy: clear messaging in the form of a logo, focus groups and training sessions; billing escholarship.org as a publishing, research and marketing platform. They formed strategic partnerships (such as the one with UC Press mentioned above), both to provide shared services and to acquire legitimacy by association. Most of all, they followed the pattern of “listen, talk, listen again.”
The interface redesign had very specific strategic goals itself: better contextualization and content aggregation; enhanced search functionality and results display; citation tools; and an emphasis on the services suite.
The collaboration with UC Press proved a large project in itself. There had already been a history of episodic, focused and opportunistic collaborative activities: escholarship editions, monographic series, the Mark Twain Project. But what about more sustained work?
In the strategic/business planning phase, it became clear that the two entities had different editorial interests and goals; different business models; different constituents; and not least, different cultures. So why force collaboration? Because, said Mitchell, the needs across UC encourage these particular separate organizations to work together. So they found a point of convergence: services. And they even found incentives for collaborating: UC Press gained associative legitimacy as a service provider (and thus opportunities for new business models were born); and the eScholarship office gained associative legitimacy as a publisher, as well as visibility.
Everybody wins. But oh, what a huge – and, it seems, gracefully executed – project!
3. Janet Sietmann, DigitalCommons Project Manager, and Teresa Fishel, Library Director, Macalester College [MN]
“Showcasing Student, Faculty, and Campus Publications; Promoting, Populating, and Publishing in a small liberal arts college IR”
Here, I’ll be honest, I gave my wrists a break and listened. If someone at BU is interested in what these folks said, please comment here; I’ll be happy to contact them and request a copy of their presentation, and summarize it on Digilib.
SPARC 2008: The Policy Environment
Thursday, December 4th, 2008The second day of the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 in Baltimore was no less exciting than the first, but it was shorter, and also contained less information immediately useful to us at BU. So I nursed my wrists, which had flared up with RSI for the first time in weeks (sign of a good, informative conference, no?) and took fewer notes.
Description from the program: “One of the challenges facing all repositories is the establishment of policies that positively affect the submission, accessibility, and re-use of materials. The wide spectrum of deposit mandates and recommendations currently in effect reflect the diverse nature of governmental and organizational funding objectives. This panel will provide three perspectives on these policies, representing current practices in Europe, Japan and the United States.”
1. David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe
“Public Policy Drivers for Change in Europe”
Scholarly community, as Prosser sees it, is being impacted by:
- the knowledge economy;
- accountability and assessment – value for money spent;
- e-science/e-research; and
- concerns regarding access to data and public sector information.
Measuring success can take many forms:
- impact in the relevant fields measured by number of citations;
- who is citing whom;
- number of downloads for each published item;
- patent registration; and
- rate of technology transfer.
The EU’s open access policies are still “young” and in the process of being continually tested. It’s been accepted that some situations will require an embargo period for publication of items in a freely accessible repository. This is considered a sub-optimal course of action, so generally the embargo period is encouraged to be set at a maximum of six months, with the ideal being zero – any embargo at all is a compromise, as far as open access advocates are concerned.
Prosser quoted Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University, as saying the following about the university press in 1878: “It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures–but far and wide.”
[VZ: To this I will add a quote from the Massachusetts Constitution, to which I was pointed recently:
Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country...
Promotion, rather than hoarding. Preserving rights and liberties by disseminating knowledge. Clear enough.]
[The speaker who described the situation in Japan was too difficult for me to understand, alas, from the back of the room. Tried to find his slides, and failed.]
3. Bonnie Klein, Defense Technical Information Center, USA
U.S. Federal Government Repositories & Public Access to Grant Research
The U.S. is running some federal repositories: CENDI, science.gov, worldwidescience.org. All of these are concerned with federally funded grant research, and provide venues for disseminating publication requirements, as well as distribution of and access to research results. CENDI is an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information (STI) managers from 13 U.S. federal agencies. WorldWideScience is more of a portal, and was launched in 2007.
In all, 26 government agencies fund over 1000 grant programs, information on all of which is available on grants.gov. The results of work funded by government grants often must be published and/or disseminated openly, unless they’re classified. They take many forms. Publications are the characteristic product (journal articles, peer-reviewed papers, books, dissertations, abstracts, interim and final tech reports). Other common products of federal-grant-funded work are websites, new networks and collaborations, technologies and techniques, inventions, patent applications, licenses, new equipment.
Klein listed some disadvantages of publishing results, and I did not have time to write them down, but mostly they amounted to secret information. There’s a slippery slope between classifying information for, say, security reasons and hoarding it, but that seems to be a problem inherent to knowledge work – I doubt there will ever come a day when we’ll have completely rigid classification criteria for knowledge, given that we keep coming up with new stuff. So we’ll just have to navigate situations as they come up.
SPARC 2008: Value-Added User Services
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008This is the remainder of the notes from the first day of the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008. The Value-Added User Services session was moderated by Kathleen Shearer from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries.
The program description says: “Now that your digital repository is up and running, what’s next? The success of repositories will depend on the extent to which users value the services they offer. What types of services are being developed to take digital repositories beyond the static repository concept and make them more attractive for deposit, search, and reuse of the material? How can these services be created and maintained, and how can repository practitioners engage with service providers? This session will explore strategies for individual repositories, as well as national and international repository networks, to improve user experiences.”
This was the single most important theme of the conference for those of us in the planning stages of IR setup, so I took detailed notes that I’ll try to organize here.
1. Joan Giesecke, Dean of Libraries, and Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
“Value-Adding Services Bundled through an Institutional Repository: A Successful Model”
A frequently encountered publishing philosophy is as follows: faculty publications that have commercial or market value should go to a university press or another publisher; whereas faculty (or student) research and manuscripts with little commercial market should be put into an IR. The difficult part is navigating the gray world between the extremes.
UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) offers not just IR services but downright digital publication (see below), in addition to tools for text analysis.
They use ContentDM databases for images and video (good for architecture and art slides, campus museums, video archive for Nebraska’s educational public television).
They use, or at least are testing, an Encore search engine. The engine brings different databases together (there’s that interoperability; it’s a useful concept within an institution as well as across institutions). It harvests Dublin Core, TEI and EAD systems into the library’s MARC catalog, raising visibility of diverse collections.
UNL started their repository with the idea of self-archiving: “the articles will add themselves,” they thought (as many of us do.) Well, that didn’t work: Paul Royster likened it to going fishing and expecting the fish to jump into the boat. OK, so model #2: Tom Sawyer whitewashes a fence. (Here’s where my notes are unclear. I believe they just done their best to make repositories sound cool: if you say everyone’s doing it, everyone will eventually be doing it. Whatever the approach—and please, someone reading this, add to my shoddy description in comments—it didn’t work.)
Since neither of those methods produced results, and Dr. Royster had a lot of time on his hands (raucous laughter from the audience), they determined to make the faculty an offer they couldn’t refuse. They turned the do-it-yourself (DIY) model on its head, and came up with DIFM (do-it-for-me). Like mediated deposit, only more so. Here are the services CDRH offered:
- handling permissions (better and more consistent compliance with contracts!)
- scanning (that way there’s central control of quality, resolution, image type, OCR, etc)
- typesetting (they make articles look professional! This part—which sounds incredibly time-consuming—is, I believe, done by a student.)
- adding metadata (self-archiving authors sometimes fail to include things like abstracts, original publication citations, etc)
- uploading/posting materials to the IR (as Royster said, even a child can do it, but there’s not always a child available)
- usage reporting: “Your article has been downloaded N times” is very very valuable (though only if N>0!)
- promotion (solicit or place links from/to Wikipedia, Online Books Page out of Penn, WorldCat, subject or discipline-based websites)
A large part of how they’ve found their audience was described as hunting and gathering—a learned skill that they don’t necessarily teach in grad school! You find the published article first, THEN seek out the author, who is usually flattered and agrees to let you add it to the IR! Copyright allowing, of course.
The UNL repository managers also actively solicit and publish original materials, and this is among their most popular content. Open access dissertations are extremely popular; they are downloaded 60 times more than restricted pay-access versions! Currently, however, UNL is gathering only about 20% of new dissertations. (The reasons for this were unclear to me.)
CDRH publishes book-length works that are otherwise unpublishable (too long, too narrow in topic, too etc.). Check out the online Dictionary of Invertebrate Zoology, which in print is over 380 pages long and sells for over $90! Or the beautifully illustrated Hopi Nation, which had been submitted to various presses over 25 years with no success. A multi-volume work of perceived limited interest with color plates—no press would touch it. They published it at UNL, and it was downloaded 523 times in the first five weeks. Awesome.
The possibilities there are many. Out of print books! Tractor testing (”we’re Nebraska, after all”), ornithology, whatever.
Royster explained exactly the resources they’ve dedicated to all this, but I did not catch the contents of that slide. I do know that CDRH consists of 9 staff members and 7 associated faculty members, and employs 10 students. However, the IR stuff is only a small part of what the Center does in terms of services and original research and development. So: impressive. (In fact, so impressive that people in the audience were slightly incredulous. Having been to UNL and visited the Center, I can attest that this is a bunch of extraordinarily well organized, smart folks whose productivity is truly impressive.)
The considerable benefits reaped by offering the services described above include:
- increased faculty participation;
- faster rate of content recruitment;
- greater degree of content usage;
- word-of-mouth recommendations by faculty;
- and, importantly, the library is where faculty come first for their electronic publication needs.
The other two papers in the session presented work being done in Europe and Japan. This was mostly stuff that isn’t very relevant to us at BU, at this stage, so I mostly listened. Only a few sparse notes from the rest of the session:
- Japanese institutions working with IRs have organized themselves into DRF, or Digital Repository Federation
- Usage leads to sustainability. When things are not used, they’re forgotten. (Seems obvious, yet the crowd’s reaction to this suggested that we tend to elide this.)
- Related: advocacy requires a fundamental usefulness to advocate for.
- The 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is a document that defines what qualifies a repository contribution as open-access, and requests free and unrestricted access to sciences and human knowledge representation worldwide. Perhaps not so simple, but these principles are taken up by
- The DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) Project. The project works toward open access to information through digital repository networks (emphasis mine -vz) in Europe and worldwide.
- To this end, DRIVER has developed D-NET, a “network evolution toolkit” available for download.
SPARC 2008: New Horizons
Monday, December 1st, 2008Some more notes from SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008. This post covers the New Horizons session. Here’s a description of the session from the program:
Early discussion of campus-based digital repositories focused on pre-print and post-print versions of faculty research papers. Many institutions have discovered strong community interest in disseminating other types of content as well – including audio, video, image research outputs, multimedia projects, and ancillary evidence such as datasets, etc. that might be created in the course of research and class work. This interest has been strengthened by requirements set by many federal agencies that data-sharing plans accompany grant applications. The New Horizons panel will explore the transformative potential of data-intensive scholarship as well as explore solutions for the depositing dilemma that redefine the repository within the library’s “story” and scope of services.
Session format was: three presentations, then a Q&A/discussion session, and all the while the internet’s a-Twitter.
Moderator’s opening note: university communication involves many different languages—humanities languages, sciences languages, administrator languages, faculty languages, etc etc. We need to speak all these languages as we build institutional repositories (IRs) and talk about sharing.
1. Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs, The Johns Hopkins University
“A Data-centric View of the Academic Universe”
On infrastructure:
-”historical infrastructures…become ubiquitous, accessible, reliable, and transparent as they mature.” – CREW, Understanding Infrastructure
-”…they will do what we expect them to do and not do what we expect them not to do…” – Amy Friedlander, JEP Triple Helix
- Communities come together and build systems to solve their own problems. It’s really when these community systems come together that infrastructure emerges. (For example, regional vs. national railroads.)
Data are fuzzy and answers are approximate. This is a belief held both by scientists and by humanists! We don’t talk much about that similarity, which is (I imagine -vz) useful for interdisciplinary communication.
IRs are, or should be, nodes in a network, not networks unto themselves. (See also the previous post. This was a running theme of the conference.)
Remember the gopher protocol, way back when? File transfer and access, pre-web. The crucially good thing about openness of gopher: it made it easy to move its contents onto the web. So even if gopher isn’t used much anymore, its content isn’t lost but ported.
Final thoughts:
- Data are fundamentally different from collections.
- The scale and complexity of data mean that machines become necessary, with communities meeting higher-level knowledge-organization needs and machines meeting lower-level ones
- IRs are [only] the beginning of our journey
- Time to get off the e-horse!! (Sayeed is tired of e-publishing, e-formats, e-everything.) Let’s talk instead about the requirements of… faculty, admininstrators, everyone—and address those requirements.
A final quote: “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” -William Gibson
2. Shawn Martin, Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Pennsylvania
“Institutional Repository Personality Disorder: How Do We Cure It?”
Definition of personality disorder: “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it.” Talking to faculty about IRs is much like talking to them about cats. (The reaction is likely to be, “…huh?”)
Traditional arguments in favor of IRs: (1) archive forever! (2) marketing tools for departments to showcase research! (3) reclaiming intellectual property of the institution! And that’s all good and true. Here’s what they have at Penn: over 4000 documents, 73 collections, 33000 downloads per month. Sounds successful up to now! So what now?
Now they provide services. These services include, stealthily, conversations with faculty. Some things they tell the Penn faculty: downloads are important; direct communication based on people finding your stuff is great; your google rankings are important and directly influenced by having your stuff in an IR; a centralized place is easier to use than a department website. Most importantly: open access does not mean it isn’t peer reviewed.
All of the above are necessary to talk to about with faculty, because they dispel some common myths about IRs. Hence, the talk about curing the IR personality disorder. It is necessary to reframe our arguments, Shawn says. Faculty generally don’t see benefits of open access to them, but they do see the opportunity of giving themselves higher profiles inside and outside Penn. They also do see the benefits of electronic publication and of including “non-traditional” materials in repository (lecture series, proceedings, etc).
What will a future IR look like? Well, we could look at IRs as the backbone of a new scholarly communication system. Backbones, however, aren’t necessarily what is most compelling to faculty. (A similar attitude for comparison: I don’t much care about electric grids, I just want the light to go on when I flip the switch.) Penn is seeing increased interest in SelectedWorks (a front-end, user-friendly tool for its IR), e-publishing possibilities, and “front-end” services. Though IRs may be an essential component, they’re not the selling point.
So, what is the selling point? These services offered by Penn:
- Getting your scholarship into Google;
- Creating your own website;
- Creating pretty online journals;
- Clearing copyright permissions;
- Uploading articles for you.
All of Penn’s services are “fringe” from most librarians’ perspectives, but to faculty they’re incredibly important. So we need to rethink how we sell IRs to faculty. Penn is trying to turn this framework around and make these services the “core” from a faculty perspective. They are:
- not advocating for either open or closed access;
- assessing scholarly needs and providing options;
- taking advantage of the greater dissemination allowed by open access;
- but conceding that closed access may provide prestige or tenure.
So at Penn they provide both closed and open access (closed-access journals get links, abstracts and other information in SelectedWorks). They are creating virtual collections of their faculty’s work and pushing it out onto the web. They also work with publishers to promote their university’s work that may be appearing in their journals. The repository folks do all this, not faculty.
3. Jennifer Campbell-Meier, Doctoral Student, University of Hawaii
“Storytelling and Institutional Repositories”
Jennifer has performed a comparative case study analysis of IR development at six institutions in the US and Canada. Many participants stated that they didn’t know how to respond when faculty members ask why they should submit materials to the IR. So Jennifer started thinking about storytelling. Stories can be springboards: they can act as visualization tools; contextualize change, promote understanding.
Oddly, googling stories + libraries, we get many results—storytime, storytelling to dogs and so on—but not how to use storytelling in academic contexts. So Jennifer noted and recorded some opportunities for storytelling, and specific conversational triggers for them. Below are some examples.
Trigger: scholarly publishing. Story: the internet and scholarly publishing—IR as a tool for scholarly communication. Share stories with faculty about open access, etc.
Trigger: tenure. Story: IR benefits for faculty. Share stories with faculty and/or grad students about IR benefits to encourage use.
Trigger: grants. Story: faculty/library collaborations. Share stories about IR as a home for grant projects, a platform for research, an opportunity for collaboration.
Trigger: legislature. Story: showcasing what a college or university does. Share stories with administrators about the IR as a showcase for the scholarly output of the institution.