lib-ir: notes on IR

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

I spent Friday visiting Stanford (SUL/AIR), including a meeting with their
"information architect" to learn more about Stanford's plans for IRs.  They
currently have no activities that I'd call an IR.  They are just getting
ready to start a new initiative to build a "Scholarly Communications
Service" that seems to be quite similar to the proposal I made for the
capital campaign.  The plan for this Scholarly Communications Service is
that it will focus on collecting and archiving peer reviewed publications,
conference & colloquium presentations, proofs & evidence (supporting
materials for scholarly papers), and source material.  So their focus is on
institutional products rather than individual, and on permanent archival
rather than on making the work accessible in the short run.  Most of their
interest is in providing the editorial and people support for soliciting
items, reformatting, and cataloging them. Their implementation plan is to
use DSpace as a front end for submission, but to use their nascent Stanford
Digital Repository as the backing store and archive.  They don't seem to be
at all excited about OAI or federated access.

So, bottom line: Stanford doesn't have anything we need to attend to.

On the other hand, the California Digital Library *is* something we need to
track.  Not only is it a big project, but it is using a different software
package, bePress.

I got some data about MIT's DSpace.  Interestingly, they have only 780 items
in their collection so far.  So they haven't yet seen a huge influx in
submissions.

In technology news, I had quite a bit of trouble getting a server running
for our pilot project.  The server I thought I had turned out to have
insufficient disk space, so I had to beg a larger hard disk and install it,
then reinstall OS and support software.  I now have a working server with
Red Hat Linux 8 installed (physically located in my office and available on
the web as http://ir.uoregon.edu), and am working on installing the DSpace
software.  Looks like this will be a somewhat complex process with lots of
pieces, so I probably won't have a DSpace instance available for testing for
at least a week.

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj@darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/