Reading Notes for 11/15/2010

1)      Mischo, W. (July/August 2005).  Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).  http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/mischo/07mischo.html

The above article explores different research projects on the development of “Federated Search”. It outlines that developing federated search is important to facilitate finding distributed information from different digital resources. It also outlines briefly on the history of developing “federated searching” through different projects and methodologies such as full-text repositories maintained by commercial and professional society publishers; preprint servers and Open Archive Initiative (OAI) provider sites; specialized Abstracting and Indexing (A & I) services; publisher and vendor vertical portals; local, regional, and national online catalogs; Web search and metasearch engines; local e-resource registries and digital content databases; campus institutional repository systems; and learning management systems.

2)      Paepcke, A. et al. (July/August 2005).  Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/paepcke/07paepcke.html

The above article highlights the National Science Foundation project named the Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI), which took place in 1994. It discusses and contrasts the point of view of both librarians and computer scientists about the development of digital libraries. It also outlines both the librarians’ views and computer scientists’ views about how the data should be organized and retrieved in digital environments. While the librarians prefer the traditional ways of collection development and using metadata in organization and retrieval, the computer scientists prefer developing algorithms for searching and retrieval without using the collection development methods. These two points of views were also affected by the advent of the World Wide Web at that time. The article concluded that there should be no conflict between the two views of librarians and computer scientists and that the librarians should utilize this new technological environment for better presenting their traditional services.

3)      Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/br226ir.pdf

The above article illustrates the nature and functions of institutional repositories and their role in transforming scholarship. It starts by defining the Institutional Repositories as a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.

Then it outlines the operational responsibility for these services which represents collaboration among librarians, information technologists, archives and records mangers, faculty, and university administrators and policymakers.

A fully realized institutional repository will contain the following:

·         The intellectual works of faculty and students--both research and teaching materials

·         Documentation of the activities of the institution itself in the form of records of events and performance and of the ongoing intellectual life of the institution

·         Experimental and observational data captured by members of the institution that support their scholarly activities

The author distinguishes between institutional repositories and scholarly publishing that the institutional repository which he proposes does not call for a new scholarly publishing role for universities, but it calls for institutional repositories as a mean of dissemination of scholarly communication. Institutional repositories can maintain data in addition to authored scholarly works. In this sense, the institutional repository is a complement and a supplement, rather than a substitute, for traditional scholarly publication venues.

The Strategic Importance of Institutional Repositories

The author summarizes the strategic importance of institutional repositories as “Institutional repositories can facilitate greatly enhanced access to traditional scholarly content by empowering faculty to effectively use the new dissemination capabilities offered by the network. This is also occurring on a disciplinary basis through the development of e-print and preprint servers, at least in some disciplines. In cases where the disciplinary practice is ready, institutional repositories can feed disciplinary repositories directly. In

cases where the disciplinary culture is more conservative, where scholarly societies or key journals choose to hold back change, institutional repositories can help individual faculty take the lead in initiating shifts in disciplinary practice.”

Cautions about Institutional Repositories

The author outlines the following three cautions about institutional repositories:

·         The first potential danger is that institutional repositories are cast as tools of institutional (administrative) strategies to exercise control over what has typically been faculty controlled intellectual work. I believe that any institutional repository approach that requires deposit of faculty or student works and/or uses the institutional repository as a means of asserting control or ownership over these works will likely fail, and probably deserves to fail.

·         The use of complex, cumbersome "gate keeping" policies for admitting materials to institutional repositories--particularly those that emulate practices from traditional scholarly publication such as the use of peer reviewers--are highly counterproductive; this will prevent institutional repositories from supporting and empowering faculty innovators and leaders.

·         An institutional repository can fail over time for many reasons: policy (for example, the institution chooses to stop funding it), management failure or incompetence, or technical problems. Any of these failures can result in the disruption of access, or worse, total and permanent loss of material stored in the institutional repository.

Institutional Repositories and Networked Information Standards and Infrastructure

The author outlines the main features of the institutional repositories and networked information standards and infrastructure as Preservable Formats which are the file formats that will be preserved in accessible forms (presumably through format migration, Identifiers which are persistent reference to materials in institutional repositories, Rights Documentation and Management which include technical part involving metadata structures; the other part is building consensus around a relatively small number of sets of terms and conditions that can cover the majority of the materials in practice. Working "standards" like the stock licenses under development by Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ can be used in rights documentation and management.

Future Developments in Institutional Repositories

Finally, the author outlines the future developments in institutional repositories as “There is a clearly evolving idea of "federating" institutional repositories but as yet little concrete exploration of what this means--cross-repository search, swaps of storage between institutional repositories to gain geographic and systems diversity in pursuit of backup, preservation, and disaster recovery, or other capabilities. This will be a fruitful area for exploration and innovation. Another part of federation is that faculty often don't stay at a single institution for their entire career, and they frequently disregard institutional boundaries when collaborating with other scholars. Federation of institutional repositories may also subsume the development of arrangements that recognize and facilitate faculty mobility and cross-institutional collaborations.”