... Special collections librarians create (or at least digitize) a thematic set of items, give them detailed cataloging, and deposit them en masse into the collection. The items are then exposed via machine interfaces to our discovery applications, that then let users find and interact with the contents in ways that our librarians think will best show them off.
The repository itself, then, can work much like a self-storage unit. Every now and then we move in a bunch of stuff, and then later we bring it out into a nicer setting when people want to look at it. Access, discovery, and delivery are built on top of the repository, in separate applications that emphasize things like faceted browsing, image panning and zooming, and rare book page display and page turning.
Our institutional repository interacts with our community quite differently. Here, the content is created by various scholars who are largely outside the library, who may deposit items bit by bit whenever they get around to it (or when library staff can find the time to bring in their content). They want to see their work widely read, cited, and appreciated. They don’t want to spend more time than they have to putting stuff in– they’ve got work to do– and they want their work quickly and easily accessible. And they’d like to know when their work is being viewed. In short, they need a gallery, not just a self-storage unit. They want something that lets them show off and distribute their work in elegant ways.
Our institutional repository applications, bundled with the repository, thus emphasize things like full text search and search-engine openness, instant downloads of content, and notification of colleagues uploading and downloading papers. ...
... In this post, I’ll describe some of the useful basic deposit and access services for institutional scholarly repositories (IRs). ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 1/16/2009 07:42:00 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.
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.
