RE: lib-ir: notes from today's IRG meeting

["JQ Johnson" <jqj@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

As usual Carol's notes are great!

It's perhaps worth noting that we also discussed "library project" in
contrast to UO collaboration, and I don't think anyone objected to the
claim that this needed to be a project that collaborated with other
support units at UO.  We discussed "works in progress vs finished works"
and agreed that the needs were likely to be discipline specific; my
sense is that we more or less agreed that we needed to accomodate both.

We also discussed "raw data sets vs data in context of scholarly work"
and definitely did not reach any consensus.  It seems that much of the
concern here is feasibility -- on the one hand, collecting scientific
datasets might prove to be a very different enterprise with different
technical and policy constraints, and hence beyond our initial
capabilities; on the other hand, collecting such datasets might prove to
be the service that was in high demand and that would drive faculty
buyin.

Per Carol's notes:  I plan to contact opportunistically various faculty
in Psychology (Freyd, others), Mathematics (Kantor), Physics (Bothun),
and Biology (Weeks, Roberts).  My sense is that at this point we're not
trying to get any sort of systematic data, but rather are hoping to get
a feeling for the range of current activities and reactions to the
general concept of library support for self-publication of scholarly
work.  More focus group than survey, in other words.  Beware in those
conversations that your contacts almost certainly haven't previously
heard the "institutional repository" buzzword.  Also, as you inquire
about disciplinary activities you might want to keep in mind that some
departments have a "tech report" culture where the DEPARTMENT provides
what is essentially an institutional repository for preprints.

JQ