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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Notes on IR discussion

Dorothea Salo, Light at the end of the tunnel, Caveat Lector, January 25, 2009. Notes on ALCTS Acquisition Managers and Vendor Discussion Group (Denver, January 25, 2009).

... Some conclusions were come to regarding the successful IR that I think are worth retailing here. One is that technology platform counts, but isn’t itself a determiner of success. Another is that clear mission, sensible planning process, and quantifiable, evaluable (and evaluated) goals do determine success, and any IR without them is swimming in fog.

A third conclusion, which I can’t emphasize enough, is that a lone IR is a dead IR, and the “maverick manager” model of IR staffing is an antipattern. The examples of successful IRs presented during the panel all had broad-based library support, with the main muscle for content development often coming from technical services or acquisitions. A fourth conclusion is that if you’re relying on self-archiving for your content, you’re delusional.

And then there was a fifth conclusion, which I myself will take to heart. A repository with broad-based support and active content recruitment can indeed succeed. We have real examples of this now (and I’m very happy that the librarian involved with MoSpace came forward to speak), and we should make much of them and take them as our models. ...