Hi Richard,
I would like to suggest still another role for IRs. All your
alternatives refer to a centralized and focused view of IR, always from
the Institution's viewpoint.
It happens that IRs might (and should, in my opinion) be viewed as an
intermediary step in opening the access to the whole of the academic
research in a fully inter-operable fashion. Providing a fully populated
IR each University or Institution is doing its part in order to form a
larger, fully inter-operable, open access and possibly universal
repository of academic research.
I mentioned IRs as being an intermediary step because even if the goal
I described is obtained at the IR level the result cannot yet be
considered satisfactory from the individual researcher's point of view,
from the point of view of the reader who is hunting for information. We
will need a further step of being able to index, by robots, without
human intervention as far as possible, the full text of disciplinary
subsets of papers in the giant interoperable repository above.
My point is that the reader is not really interested in navigating in
hundreds of IRs, he is interested in navigating some coherent section of
the scientific literature, irrespective of the Institution where the
results were produced. Of course, the Institution and other general
quality indicators will be very important in order to help the reader in
selecting what he needs.
Indeed, ideally, IRs should be mounted now in order to be able to
participate of this further, more elaborate step in the future.
Please note that forming suitable IRs today is an essential and very
important step in achieving the larger goal tomorrow!
Yours,
Imre Simon
> Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2005 10:12:50 -0000
> From: Richard Poynder <aotg20_at_DSL.PIPEX.COM>
> Subject: Institutional Repositories
>
> Hi All,
>
> I am aware that the concept of "the institutional repository" (IR)
> tends to mean different things to different people, so I would be
> interested in hearing people's views on the topic.
>
> Amongst the different roles I have heard people argue that IRs
can/should play are:
>
> a) as a repository for a university's research output, with the aim of
> increasing access to that research, and so enhancing its impact
>
> b) as a tool for preserving and curating a university's research output
>
> c) as a tool to assist a university in its digital publishing
ambitions, and
>
> d) as a tool to enable universities offer digital courseware and
> online learning services.
>
> Would others agree that IRs are viewed as potentially assisting in all
> these tasks?
>
> Are there other tasks people see being assigned to IRs?
>
> Can an IR play a number of different roles simultaneously, or should
> it be restricted to just one (possibly two) roles? What are the pros
> and cons of using an IR to play more than one role?
>
> Also, what solutions are people choosing when setting up IRs? I am
> aware that there are now a number of software and service providers
> (both for profit and non-profit), including Eprints, DSpace, Fedora,
> ProQuest and BMC. But what are people's views on the roles these
> different providers can/should play? Are they playing them well?
>
> Finally, I am also curious as to the current state of play in the
> major universities (Stanford, Yale, University of California, MIT,
> CalTech, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge etc. etc.). I assume they all now
> have IRs up and running, but what sort of IRs are they creating, what
> solutions are they choosing when creating them, what roles are being
> assigned to these IRs, and how are these universities going about
> populating them with the institution's research output?
>
> Richard Poynder
>
> Freelance Journalist
>
> <http://www.richardpoynder.com/> www.richardpoynder.com
>
> <http://poynder.blogspot.com/> http://poynder.blogspot.com
>
> [text/html]
>
Received on Fri Dec 23 2005 - 19:02:55 GMT