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.