What We Talk About When We Talk About Repositories

Even in areas of traditional, formalized publication, computationally intensive research has begun to affect the nature of the research article, its relationship to the journal as an outlet, and its relationship to the primary evidence that supports its argument.²⁴ Figures, tables, and other graphics have provided a means to adumbrate evidence in the context of a scholarly argument in print. In the sciences, new observational tools and high performance computing resources have made possible the capture and analysis of research data on a very large scale that often extends beyond a single university or nation. Such research, and its related outputs, poses tremendous challenges for universities, libraries, and scientists to devise stable environments for secure, long-term access. At Johns Hopkins University, the Libraries have worked closely with astronomers based at Hopkins and with the National Virtual Observatory to explore what technological capacity and organizational expertise will be required to capture and manage astronomical data. An element of this project has included work with major publishers in the field to define and test persistent methods of publishing experimental data sets along with the formal written article reporting on the research. Here the library has begun to develop a service that supports not only their local community but potentially the entire profession of astronomy.²⁵

Conclusions

After all the hype, today it is most critical to identify the content-driven services that can be offered through “repositories,” and which of these our libraries need to offer to our clients, however we define them. I am of two minds about whether all libraries should offer such services. On the one hand, we do have a mission to collect, manage, preserve, and provide access to resources for our user base and the wider world. But we are well past the days when all collections needed to reside physically on each campus, and we are approaching times when replication of similar technology services on each campus may prove to be economically impossible. If content management and delivery services have a limited audience on a given campus, it may be better to partner with others to offer or to rent the needed technology. That is heresy to many because it contradicts our philosophy of retaining control over “our” materials. But scale matters, and if we cannot achieve it on our own, we will risk poorly managing services that have limited use.

No library should implement a digital repository program without examining the role it will play in its broader strategy for collection development, stewardship, and providing access to its primary constituencies. That strategy should be based on a clear understanding of the communitys needs and the requirements for long-term stewardship of the data collected. Most importantly, it should include a critical assessment of the librarys ability to fully meet those needs, including funding, the skills of its staff, and the benefit of the service relative to the cost of operating it.²⁶ We cannot do everything, especially now, and we should be willing to walk away from that which doesnt work for us. As an administrator, I appreciate that this is much more easily said than done.

We tend to build silos for our collections and services, either because of organizational politics, convenience, feasibility, or just because we are predisposed to think about fitting things into buckets. Some libraries that are offering significant services for original publications—such as journals, for articles such as pre– or postprints, and for large collections of reformatted or born-digital materials—operate some or all of these services through different software and different operational divisions of that library. Heterogeneous content and heterogeneous communities require heterogeneous services, but a coherent organizational strategy and economies of scale should underlie these.

Access services to repository content present their own challenges. The relative quality of the user interfaces and overall user experience of interacting with our tools and systems continues to be a problem throughout all library systems. California Digital Library has begun an effort to revamp user interfaces and functionalities in their eScholarship repository—which is unusual given their use of a commercial service provider, BePress—but this takes many resources to do effectively. I once solicited feedback from a faculty member using a cross-collection metadata search for a digital library collection. Comparing it to “those finding aids they make me use in special collections,” he said it looked like librarians created it for librarians. Ouch.

Then there is the issue of authenticity and value, and what that means in different contexts and for different communities. While software can help to ensure that the digital files integrity remains stable, it is still difficult to identify and explain variations in the multiple versions of materials deposited in different repositories (Google Scholar can at least identify related versions, however). Some repository services dont easily support versioning, and we might be reluctant to withdraw items deposited, even if an author offered a substantial revision in its place. But if we deliver a draft of an article in our repository, but perhaps dont subscribe to the outlet producing the finished product, how do we help our users know how to evaluate what they find in our collections? Here public services, collection development policies, and technology programs need to work in concert to help convey the context for what is found online in our electronic collections.

When we talk about repositories, or better, the services we offer through them, we should be discussing the social side of technology and its adoption. Repository programs are still exotic, or even scary, to too many of our colleagues, and most librarians were never trained to make the sale for experimental services or projects. But those programs must be integrated into the rest of the librarys services. Public services librarians meet students every day in the classroom, in the library, or online, and, despite their slight reluctance to pay us a visit in the library, faculty still call upon us. All of us have a responsibility to gently query our teaching and research colleagues to divine the needs that they didnt know they had, and try to match those to the services we can provide. That, in turn, requires more active communication across the divisions of our libraries to ensure that the programs we offer are integrated into instruction, reference, and collection development. In some fields, perhaps especially in the sciences, many researchers cannot imagine why or how the library could do anything but subscribe to journals, even as they struggle to document and organize their work. We have huge obstacles to overcome, but the library remains a trusted brand and our partners are out there and talking. Johanna Drucker, a professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education that:

the design of new [online] environments for performing scholarly work cannot be left to the technical staff and to library professionals. The library is a crucial partner in planning and envisioning the future of preserving, using, even creating scholarly resources. So are the technology professionals. But in an analogy with building construction, they are the architects and the contractors. The creation of archives, analytic tools, and statistical analyses of aggregate data in the humanities (and in some other scholarly fields) requires the combined expertise of technical, professional, and scholarly personnel.²⁷

In other words, we have to engage and guide researchers, but we also must let them lead us, possibly where we might not have expected, or maybe even wouldnt want them to go. We cant assume we know best, or the library will end up running a repository, i.e., “a place in which a dead body is deposited; a vault or sepulchre.”

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