RE: Library Plan-- appointments

[jqj@darkwing.uoregon.edu]

Heather, Andrew, Barbara,

 

Carol and I are looking forward to working with you on the Institutional Repositories project.  We'll schedule a first face to face meeting soon.  In the meantime, I have some homework for you -- a couple of articles that are important for you to have read if you haven't already seen them.

 

The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper, by Raym Crow.  ARL.  27 August 2002.  http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html

This was the paper that defined the concept as of 6 months ago (though my sense is that the community has evolved since then).

 

DSpace: An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository, by MacKenzie Smith, Mary Barton, Margret Branschofsky, Greg McClellan, Julie Harford Walker, Mick Bass, Dave Stuve, and Robert Tansley.  D-Lib Magazine, 9(1), January 2003.  http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/smith/01smith.html

As you are probably aware, DSpace is usually pointed to as the canonical example of an institutional respository, so it's particularly important that we all be familiar with what the folks at MIT have done and are doing.

 

Also do a google search for "institutional repositories" and follow leads you find.

 

I'd like you to start thinking about a couple of questions to help us inform our initial discussions. 

 

I expect that we'll begin with an attempt at a provisional definition of what we mean by "institutional repository", so the first question is "what is an 'institutional repository', and how does it resemble or differ from related things like a disciplinary statistical archive or preprint collection, or a university archive, or a library web site?"  I don't think there is any clear agreed definition, and I think that how we decide to define it will shape our work even if we eventually go back and redefine it.

 

A second question is "what tasks do we need to complete as part of our charge?"  And related to this, what tasks are early in our critical path?  Review our charge.

 

A third question is "what resources do we need for our initiative?"  I'm thinking initially of the specific question "who else, either inside or outside the library, do we need to involve in our early projects?"

 

JQ