Getting the Most Out of Your Institutional Repository:
Gathering Content and Building Use

Welcoming Remarks

Todd Carpenter, Managing Director, NISO
biography

Opening Plenary: Institutional Repositories

Greg Zick, Vice President, Digital Collection Services, OCLC
biography • presentation
This opening plenary documents the history of the IR and charts a course for the future by providing an overview of evolving IR tools and services.

The Third Wave of Library's Information Stewardship:
Managing Local, Digital Material

Peter Murray, Assistant Director for New Service Development,
OhioLINK: the Ohio Library and Information Network
biography • presentation

[Academic] Libraries are gearing up for the third wave of information under our stewardship. In the first wave, libraries purchased, made discoverable, and managed information from commercial sources in physical forms (e.g., paper-bound monographs, traditional serials, and microform archives). In the second wave, libraries licensed, made discoverable, and supported information from commercial sources in digital form (e.g., electronic journals, index/abstract databases, and image collections).

Libraries are now entering the third wave: selecting, publishing, and curating locally-produced digital content (institutional repositories, pre-print archives, and other locally unique collections). In this third wave, we need the skills and techniques of all of the previous stages, plus a need to learn a few new tricks. This presentation offers an overview of the selection, publication, and curation of locally-produced digital content. The speaker will also end with a glimpse of the fourth wave.

Sponsored by

The Future of DSpace: Making It Personal

John S. Erickson, Principal Scientist, Media and Information Systems Group, HP Labs
biography • presentation

Surveys of open repository adopters over the past few years have confirmed the "institutional" focus of institutional repositories. The motivations for implementing IRs have historically been those of the host institution, whereas the stated benefits to individual users and contributors have either been those of the institution projected onto to them, or are obvious shared goals such as enabling greater access to information or providing managed, long-term preservation of artifacts. These same surveys clearly identify that sustaining a constant stream of contributions from the user community is the chronic threat to the health of repositories; even though all open repository platforms have been designed for self-service ingestion, it is a fact that the strongest and freshest repositories are those with professional staffs who are responsible for content management, a luxury few institutions can afford. The simple truth is that participation in an IR today represents extra effort for the busy scholar, effort that doesn't add real value to their research, their authorship, or their collaboration with others in their field.

We and others in the DSpace community are considering novel ways to give researchers more incentive to "live" within DSpace, including features that will motivate them to spend significant time there, manage their content there, and make formal submission of content into the IR an easier and more natural part of their work. In general, we'd like the user's personal space or "desktop" within DSpace to be an amplifier of their scholarly activities. For example, we believe that users should have basic --- but in this Web2.0 world, expected --- capabilities available to them for relating their current activities and interests to other artifacts in local DSpace collections, so at HPLabs we are experimenting with features like item bookmarking and tagging within local collections and using such constructed "context" as a basis for recommending related items. We're looking at ways to leverage this further as a basis for identifying and retrieving related items within that repository's federation (see our earlier notes on pf-dspace in this blog and elsewhere) and especially for identifying colleagues with related interests. And we hope to apply these techniques to the identification and harvesting of related materials from other, heterogeneous sources such as external blogs, wikis, and web sources

Lunch

1:00 - 1:45 p.m.

Wanted: The Right Content and the Right Content Rights

Trisha L. Davis, Associate Professor, Rights Management Coordinator, and Head, Serials & E-Resources Department
The Ohio State University Libraries
biography
Intellectual content in digital form has become a valuable commodity in both the public and private sectors. When a commodity is highly valued, the fundamental rights to copy, transform and distribute become as valuable as the content itself and must be acquired along with a copy of the commodity. Managing an institutional repository requires not only content selection, acquisition, digitization, storage, indexing, and distribution control, but the rights to do so. The challenge to acquire these rights begins with selection and continues through the entire process.

Identification of copyright ownership is not simple in many cases. Securing the needed rights often is an even more difficult task. When contributing content to an institutional repository, content providers frequently offer to grant rights they in fact do not have. These content providers may not even understand the basic principles of intellectual property law as related to their own creations. The institution must work closely with the content providers to clearly identify intellectual property ownership and assure the correct permissions and rights have been granted for deposit in the IR. Many variables come into play with each contribution, such as the origins and nature of the content, the IR's ability to control access and distribution, and the long term commitment to maintain the agreed upon rights. This presentation defines rights management for academic institutional repositories and offers examples of rights needed and how to obtain them.

OAI Object Re-Use & Exchange (ORE)

Herbert Van de Sompel, Team Leader, Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team, Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory
biography • presentation

Object Re-Use & Exchange (ORE) is a new interoperability effort by the Open Archives Initiative that previously published the widely used Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

The ORE effort was launched in response to a significant challenge that has emerged in eScholarship. In contrast to the paper publications of traditional scholarship, or even their digital counterparts, the artifacts of digital scholarship are complex aggregations composed of multiple resources with varying media types, semantics types, network locations, and intra- and inter-relationships. The future scholarly communication infrastructure, which contains institutional repositories as core building blocks, requires standardized approaches to identify, describe, and exchange these new types of scholarly objects.

The presentation will introduce the problem domain addressed by the ORE effort, and will outline the proposed interoperability solution as described in the ORE Specifications that are being prepared for public release, early 2008.

2:30 - 3:15 p.m.

What You're Up Against

Dorothea Salo, Digital Repository Librarian, University of Wisconsin at Madison
biography • presentation
Understand the barriers between you and a successful repository program. Learn the flaws in the paradigm on which most repositories have been implemented, and how you can plan around them. Check in with current best practices surrounding service models, staffing, and administrative support.

Break

Sponsored by

3:30 - 4:15 p.m.

Distilling Strategic Directions for Repositories from Faculty and Librarian Attitudes

Roger C. Schonfeld, Manager of Research, Ithaka
biography • presentation
Both faculty members and academic librarians express deeply conflicted views about the purpose of repositories, and engagement with repositories varies widely. To what purposes are repositories being put, and what purposes does the community have in mind for them? Is the repository movement just another fad, or is there potential to introduce widespread change? Should repositories be organized on an institutional basis or in some other way? In 2006, Ithaka conducted large-scale nationwide surveys of faculty members and librarians at 4-year academic institutions. This presentation will share some of the most relevant findings, including breakdowns by institutional profile and, among faculty members, discipline, with an emphasis on some of the strategic directions that these findings indicate.

4:15 - 5:00 p.m.

ETDs: A Logical Addition to Your Digital Repository?

Terry M. Owen , DRUM Coordinator, Digital Repository at the University of Maryland
biography • presentation
Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are often thought of as a quick and easy way to populate a new repository, with the expectation that, except for an initial start-up effort, the collection would grow effortlessly.  As it has turned out for the University of Maryland, ETDs have required ongoing attention and have had some unexpected consequences.  ETDs have lead to the creation of, as well as the frequent adjustment to, automatic loader programs, regular communications and negotiations with the Graduate School, setting up procedures for offering embargoes and writing the necessary code to implement them, adjusting ILL and cataloging practices, renegotiating contracts for paper copies, and long-term preservation of the files.

5:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Reception