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Funny thing…
24 Nov 09
I was just looking at this today, my university’s Social Justice and Globalization Data Archive (sorry if the late 90s-style web design gives anyone a headache). I have a vague recollection of how and when this was set up, but had kind of forgotten about it. So I spent a little time browsing, trying to figure out exactly what I was looking at. (Flash is hard!)
Then this evening I ran across this, by the incomparable Dorothea Salo:
I heard yesterday that one such corpus, while of impressive quality and very highly regarded in the discipline, was all but invisible on its home campus, according to the corpus’s own staff. Basically, these projects are what I have previously called fiefdoms. (If you don’t like that word, you may wish to substitute “research lab.” Most of what I’ll say applies to them as well.)
Sustainability is the crucial flaw in any sort of fiefdom model for data management. Most fiefdoms get the ball rolling with grant money. This may commit the institution to a certain amount of financial or in-kind support (depending on what the grant spells out), or it may not. If it does, that institutional support lasts only as long as the grant does. No one in this cycle—not the researchers in the fiefdom, not the institution, not the grant agency, no one—takes responsibility for the post-grant existence of anything the fiefdom produces.
Sustainability: the institutional fiefdom
Posted by pzed on November 24, 2009 at 8.38pm
Categories: digital initiatives, libraries, twitter
