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institutional repositories
16 Sep 09
I’ve been planning, for a few months now, to start using this space to think more deeply about my job. Among other things, I’m Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Windsor’s Leddy Library. What a job title like “Digital Initiative Librarian” might mean differs greatly from institution to institution; as in most things related to libraries, I think this is a by-product of the fact that we’re trying to figure out what it is we do anymore. I’m fortunate that I have a fair amount of leeway in deciding exactly what it is that our version of the Digital Initiatives Librarian will do.
But the position does come with some expectations, and one of these is to guide the development of our institutional repositories. The problem is, I’ve always been a little skeptical that libraries should dedicate resources to archiving copies of the published work of their faculty. Essentially, you end up with a large collection of disparate materials united only by the fact that at least one of their authors was affiliated with a specific institution. And nobody asks themselves, “Gee, I wonder what people at University X are doing in my discipline?” One of the reasons why academic journals exist is to collate research output by discipline, and if I want to stay on top of things in my field, I read those journals.
Not to say there aren’t useful things we can do under the rubric of institutional repositories. For institution, at Leddy we’ve been working on locally mounting digitized copies of UWindsor dissertations and theses. But generally, I don’t think creating additional copies of already published works and “exposing” their metadata is a particularly useful contribution to scholarship.
Now, it’s not like I haven’t read anything about this in the past, but I need to do a bit more focused reading over the next little while. And since I’m going to talk about it here, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to expose my prejudices first.
Posted by pzed on September 16, 2009 at 4.02pm
Categories: digital initiatives, libraries :: Tags: institutionals repositories
Comments on "institutional repositories"
I wonder if there’s more value in reaching into the spaces where content is created on campus than in providing some weak level of enhanced access for the ponderous objects that emerge. In some ways, I would rather see something like a library sponsored Google Wave installation provided for Faculty than a digital graveyard like DSpace.
Posted by art on September 19, 2009 at 4.04pm :: link
