Transcript Institutional Repositories: The Beginning of the Journey

Institutional Repositories: The
Beginning of the Journey
Sayeed Choudhury
Utah State IR Conference
September 30, 2009
Two Quotes
• “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a
single step.”
– Lao-tzu, Chinese philosopher
• “No other movement has had more promise
or has delivered less on that promise than
institutional repositories.”
– Greg Crane, Bostonian philosopher (actually
Editor-in-Chief for Perseus Project)
Beginning of the Journey
• IRs as part of scholarly transformation (Rick
Johnson)
• IRs as a set of services (Cliff Lynch)
• IRs as preservation systems (DSpace)
• IRs became a collection development mechanism
• “Technology alone cannot engender
transformation”
- Sayeed Choudhury
Where are we now?
• Some notable successes but…
• Also equal number (perhaps even more?)
cases of difficulty with engaging faculty or
gathering content
• Scope creep – Is DSpace really being used as a
preservation system or an asset management
system? Is Fedora being used to support
different types of access?
Return to First Principles
• What are we trying to accomplish? What is
our “elevator pitch” for IRs?
• Who is our audience? Who are our
customers?
• What are their requirements? What services
are we trying to support?
• How do we choose, build, and integrate
systems into infrastructure?
Scholarly Communication
• While IRs may not have changed scholarly
communication, scholarly communication has
certainly changed in the last few years
• Typically think of open access, which is true,
but I am referring to deeper changes that
occur earlier in the chain
• Fundamental changes related to data as the
new foundational element
Data Flow (Levels of Data)
Pixel data collected
by telescope
Sent to Fermilab
for processing
Beowulf Cluster
produces catalog
Loaded in a
SQL database
Data Model using OAI-ORE
Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)
Institutional Repositories
• Institutional repositories are nodes on the
distributed infrastructure for new forms of
scholarly communication. They are a set of
services that support the preservation and
access to institutional collections, particularly
unique or special collections.
Remember Gopher?
• 15 year ago, some of us might have still been
running Gopher servers. How many of us are
still running Gopher servers?
• While Gopher servers don’t provide access,
the content was transferable onto the Web?
• Do we think we’ll be running DSpace or
Fedora (to choose your favorite IR software)
10-15 years from now?
Acknowledgements
DataNet award for “The Data Conservancy”
NLG grant award LG0606018206
• Alex Szalay (Data Flow slide)
• Tim DiLauro and David Reynolds (OAI-ORE)