Bryan Lawrence, Function Creep and Institutional Repositories, an undated blog entry apparently posted today. Excerpt: 'The case for institutional repositories (IRs) is well made in Crow et.al.: The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper...as long as the definition of "digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community" is appropriate. I think many of those who are considering establishing, funding, and running IRs are visualising IRs which encapsulate documents (whether published or not), but the natural tendency of many is to be (dangerously) all inclusive....The problem of course is that once one asks what a digital repository is for, one gets answers in terms of open access and preservation. Readers of my blog will know that I'm totally in favour of open access, but I don't believe too many of the folk who are advocating IRs including non-document data have thought too much about the preservation problems they will be entertaining with data as opposed to documents....Nationally, it is recognised that coping with the data deluge is a problem, yet most of these IRs seem to think that they can be set up with relatively modest investment. The idea that "institutional repository systems must be able to accommodate thousands of submissions per year, and eventually must be able to preserve millions of digital objects and many terabytes of data" is fine. However, it is only technically feasible for an institution at modest cost, if, and only if, one limits the format and variety of digital objects in the repository.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/01/2005 12:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
