More on Repositories
Because my institution is somewhat of a “latecomer” to the institutional repository initiative, we have the advantage of seeing what has come before - unfortunately, much of what has come before seems to indicate that the “digital repository,” at least in its current forms (DSpace, Fedora, ePrints, and other dedicated “repository” software), simply doesn’t work.
Oh, it works in the sense that it allows individuals to upload materials to a centralized server and tag the contributions with metadata (allowing it to be searched and interrelated). But the problem - something discussed pretty much everywhere I see repositories discussed (there are many, many blogs talking about this topic: Caveat Lector, for instance; Peter Murray Rust’s blog; the Digital Curation Center) - is that these tools, despite their power, are simply extra work for the people who are supposed to feed them.
Digital repositories, ideally, are the place where university faculty, staff, and/or students can place their scholarly work so that others can find it and so the university can accumulate a large digital collection of the scholarly output of its employees. The catch is that these systems require additional work on the part of the faculty member to participate, and the consensus among those who have investigated such things seems to say that faculty researchers are willing to invest precisely zero additional work in contributing to a repository. The value proposition for the repository is simply not adequately made. The visible benefits of this outcome are many. The visible benefits of the investment are AWOL.
Recently, a couple blogs - Digital Curation’s negative-click repositories entry and Peter Murray Rust’s put it on the web discussion - addressed the fact that nobody wants to mess around with clumsy, user-surly, or work-added repository systems. The “negative-click repository” idea focuses more on the pure lack of interest in investing “clicks” in the process of contributing to a repository. Chris Rusbridge’s argument is the “negative-click” repository, a system that makes the process of getting material into the repository transparent (or nearly so) to the contributor. Read more…