Pressure from university IT departments is driving the development and adoption of library automation (LA) tools, and fuelling the current spate of mergers and acquisitions in the LA market....Pressures closer to home are also driving the adoption and development of LA tools. “There will be more integration with e-learning and institutional repositories (IR), which will bring in a lot more publishing and workflow technologies to the library,” said [Rein van Charldorp, managing director of OCLC PICA]. Institutional repositories pose a challenge, he added. “Building the IR is easy, getting the information in and out is much harder. To keep up with this pace you have to invest,” he said.
Comment. I don't see the problem getting content out of an OA repository, if this means finding and downloading it rather than removing it. What will library automation tools do to make discovery and downloading easier? As for getting material in, will the tools streamline or even automate the deposit process? Will they change the culture of inertia? I really can't tell what van Charldorp has in mind.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/11/2006 10:33:00 AM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
