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May 02, 2008

IR, Digital Library, or Personal Digital Repository?

Recently Tim Robson, Deputy Director of the Kelvin Smith Library, and I were invited to give a talk at a TEDSIG conference in Columbus. Below is the rough outline of my talk.

The PowerPoint as well as the bibliography are attached.

Slide 2

Color-changing Card Trick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE

What does this have to do with IR's? Nothing. And Everything. How so? Because just like this video, IR's are about Personalities. They're about Politics. They’re ultimately about people. And they're about where you focus your attention. What you look at indicates what you’re interested in. It also tells what you’re not interested in (what you’re not looking at). One of my favorite lines of poetry is from W. S. Merwin who, in his poem entitled By Day and by Night writes:

Shadow , index of the sun...

In the court of his brilliance

You set up his absence like a camp.

That is, often as not, one thing points to its opposite: what you focus on shows what you’re not looking at.

Slide 3

The man, Richard, you see in this video is Richard Wiseman. Dr. Wiseman started his life as a magician before going on to get his doctorate in psychology: he now is Professor of Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. But he's better known for his website http://www.quirkology.com, which, among other things, actively seeks to debunk hoaxes. (IMO, this avenue in Dr. Wiseman's life speaks volumes about him: a) he either went into magic because he was one of those people who needs to know how it’s done or b) he believed in magic rather than focusing on the effect focused on the fact that it is trickery and slight-of-hand and was so emotionally scarred and stunted by the epiphany that he decided to spend his life attacking other people who dared to believe anything else.

Slide 4

So, why am I bringing this up? It comes into play because Wiseman has had a noted on-going dispute with this man: http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/, Professor Brian Josephson. Dr. Josephson received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1973 for his work on SQUIDS: superconducting quantum interference devices; but, despite the Nobel Prize and other very highly respected contributions to physics, he had the misfortune of deciding that parapsychology was an interesting field to venture into. (I have since learned that there is not only a well-known, but well-documented hatred between parapsychologist and physicists; so one of their own crossing over would seem to be loaded with special sensitivity—this, despite the fact that parapsychology asserts that there are forms of matter and energy that exist that we don't know about and it, presumably, is the duty of physicists to study forms of matter and energy—both known and unknown.

Slide 5

The dispute, interestingly enough, involves this girl: http://paginas.terra.com.br/educacao/criticandokardec/natasha_demkina_summary_update.html; Natasha Demkina who asserts that she can look into people's bodies and see their internal organs functioning and tell what is wrong with a person who is sick. Dr. Wiseman set up a study which came to be a documentary on the Discovery Channel. Wiseman concluded Demkina was a fraud, not because she failed to detect the sickness in 4 of 7 people put up before her, but because she failed to detect the sickness in 5 of 7, per the contract Wiseman duped her into signing. But this dispute is neither here nor there.

Slide 6

Which brings us to Paul Ginsparg, who founded Arxiv.org in the early 1990s. We are brought full circle by this: http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/archivefreedom/main.html; an open letter written by Dr. Josephson who describes his experience of being black-listed from ArXiv (http://www.arxiv.org), which is an archive of preprints in physics, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear science, quantitative biology, and statistics. Dr. Josephson feels he is blacklisted due to his association with the Mind Matter Unification Project that he founded, which again, examines issues related to parapsychology. It is interesting to note the role he attributes to librarians in this process toward the end of his letter:

Slide 7

The power structure of the archive

“The archive is run along the lines of a secret society/classic bureaucracy. As noted, all communication (except with the librarian who is officially in charge of the archive) is with people who write anonymously under an alias. Letters to Paul Ginsparg, the person who set up the system, are met with the response that he is not responsible for the day to day running of the system. Cornell's President made a formal complaint to Ginsparg, and relayed back the message that one should contact the librarian, whose role seems to be to generate one of a set of bland responses such as thanking one for one's interest in the archive, the information that the archive's procedures are under revision (a process that seems to be even slower and drawn out than the processes of Cambridge University administration), or being 'comfortable with our policy that the contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards'.

Slide 8

This opening may seem provocative and, in some ways, I hope that it is. I hope that it is not viewed as being maliciously provocative, as I don’t want you to take what I say as being flippant, which it is not; but at the same time, positively provocative in that it 1) get’s your attention—something that, as a speaker, I require; and 2) per the opening, draws your attention to where it should be, in my opinion, regarding matters of Institutional Repositories. For without a doubt, institutional repositories draw attention to human questions; or as Frederich Nietzsche might say, human all too human. That is, vanity, pride, and personal opinions are a factor, frustrations will occur (intentionally or otherwise), and failure is an option.

Some of you may have noted in my bio that I write plays. It is critically important when developing characters that you take into account their three-dimensional nature. That is, what a character may want overtly, or state that he or she wants, overtly, may be in conflict with what the character wants in his or her deepest heart of hearts. What is on the surface may not be an accurate reflection or presentation of what is beneath. The same is true of the people that you encounter every day, and will certainly be the case of the people that you encounter in soliciting content for your IR. You have to be aware that motivations are not necessarily altruistic, and you have to be able to appeal to these motivations—and at the same time you have to recognize your own motivations for what they are: you’re trying to fill your archive; you’re trying to show-off your institution; you’re trying to project your library into the campus eye.

Example: A Junior Faculty Member

A simple example might do here as well. Take a junior faculty member who is working toward tenure. It will be very difficult to convince her that publishing an article in an open access journal is to her advantage when so much of her status in academe is based on the old publish or perish model of scholarly communication—a model that relishes the struggle to get published, and, as David Mamet might say (in reference to his play Oleanna) a model that could be perceived as a form a structural hazing, a model that thrives on overly dense constructs like a journal impact factor as a measures of importance and relevance—so not only is this junior faculty member judged on her ability to get published in the first place, but where she gets published is important as well.
I won’t beat this horse any longer, but just point out that there must be human considerations in this equation, to ignore them is to stand look at your meager collection of faculty submitted materials and not understand why the flocks have yet to descend upon you.

Slide 9

There is a quotation from an OCLC Environmental Scan in 2003 that summarizes this point very well:
“The most significant challenge facing academic libraries undertaking these institutional repository projects is not technical, however. The major challenge is cultural. Too few initiatives include all the stakeholders—faculty, library staff, IT staff and instructional designers—and there is no common view of what an institutional repository is, what it contains and what its governance structure should be.” http://www.oclc.org/reports/escan/research/repositories.htm
So what does all this mean? I hope it serves as a general framework for this discussion, which will move from some theoretical discussion to practical considerations: just like the video, it will move from the somewhat confounding sleight of hand to the concrete deconstruction of strategies and approaches: from the how’d they do that, to the manipulation of the camera’s focus and direction. Not to align myself too closely with the message of Dr. Wiseman, but we’ve got to move from the perception of the great goods offered by an IR to the raw reality of what it takes to make them work.

Optional: Depending on how you feel it’s going

[Guard Story] Tie in to magic trick—that is, what is it you’re focused on and what are you missing by focusing on what you’re focusing on?
“But we are not necessarily effective, that is, we do not manage for the overall desired effects. Why do I say this? Simply because, what we conceive about our business is not sufficient to fully understand all the effects that are actually happening in and around our business. Like the border guard in the story, we are completely unable to perceive all of the dynamics of our business environment because our conception limits our perception. Our accumulation of, and intense focus on, our knowledge, controls what we believe. And, what we believe controls what we are able to see. What haven’t you noticed lately?” Mark Federman, Chief Strategist, McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto.

Wrap up

So, the only way that you can control what you focus on is to make sure you’re seeing everything, or as much of everything as you can see—not like the video, focusing on only one part of an equation—especially one that someone else has handed you. To this end I’ll begin be talking a bit about the environment—not to cover territory already ably covered by Tim, but to look at, to explore, and to question a bit more broadly what is going on; then I’ll focus in on and address what I feel are key drivers for the communities that we have to approach (and I admit there will be some overlap between these two); and finally, I’ll talk about specific examples at Case.
Institutional Repositories

I was going to ask you some questions, such as:


  1. How many of you here have an institutional repository at your institution?

  2. How many of your institutions are collecting absolutely everything that you can?

  3. So, you’re not collecting everything? Why not?

  4. So how do you choose what to collect? I don’t mean to pick on you; it’s a question that we all have to ask.


but in looking at the list I see most of you, if not all of you do. Begin more broadly in considering Institutional Repositories.

Still, one of the fundamental questions that we must ask is what is the role of the Institutional Repository in each of our communities?

Is it a pre-print service? An open access collection? Does it move more closely to a digital library and house items from Special Collections? Or is it grey literature that seeks to contain the materials used by scholars to create their articles: data sets, versions of papers, etc.?

This question, the role of the IR, is fundamental; and one that will certainly point to possibilities regarding how content is gathered, and how we approach people about giving us their content. That is, what do we want this stuff for?

Digital Case has been around since 2006, and as you heard from Tim the planning stages date it further back still. As we all look around the current landscape we see more and more of these things springing up all around, as well as the underlying technology packages: DSpace, Content DM, Greenstone, Fedora and more. So the question is why?

Let’s look at some key questions and then some figures and findings from a short lit review.

PowerPoint
Discuss IRs

So, after looking at this very brief description of IRs, there are some patterns that should be emerging and hopefully some fundamental questions, one of which, I think, is to what end? Institutional Repositories of the type that we’re speaking of today are relatively new, but their predecessors in a University Archives surely are not. Institutional Repositories in a physical sense have been around for a very long time and many of them, as we all know, are referred to as libraries. So what is the impetus to transform them? Is it novelty? Was it novelty that made pong on an Atari system more interesting the badminton for thousands of teens in the 1980s? Or did the logic of the game itself somehow transform? My perception is that the logic of the game did not alter fundamentally, but the transformation of the method certainly added a new set of skills and concerns to the gamesmanship, and that certainly is the case when it comes to the transformation of institutional archives to online repositories.

In some sense the goal is the same: to store, to maintain, to preserve, to hold and keep: retain those things that are deemed worthy of storing, maintaining, and preserving by whomever it is that makes these decisions. But, of course, we all know that it doesn’t end there. The novelty, if you’ll permit the word, of an online repository is the “value added” features: remote access; ability to ‘massage’ the data or the output; or beyond just remote access: access to items a patron normally would not get near in the physical world. Free or open access to scholarly output.

These things we know. These things we can point to and say: this is the good that institutional repositories represent. And when it comes to selling an emeritus faculty member on depositing his life’s work in an institutional repository, some of these arguments work very well. But what of our junior faculty member from before: who is still pushing and shoving against the scholarly communications system, jockeying for the recognition that will guarantee her a place at the institutional table? What gain is there to her in placing an article in an open access archive? Does this count toward tenure? What need does she have for preservation, storage, or maintenance? That is the concern of another day. What benefit may be gleaned by access from a distant land: other than notoriety? And is that in and of itself a valid reason to deposit to an institutional repository? What of the faculty member who hates that the print collection in the library is being pushed to storage to make room for the re-invention of space that the modern library requires to actively participate in the scholarly communication process? The innovative spaces that allow for the movement of material from print or analog to digital, that allow for spontaneous interactions with other faculty members, that allow for group interactions in active spaces that foster not the shushing and silences of old, but active collaborations and communications requisite in a library 2.0, socially networked university environment? What of him? Why should your leading researcher in epidemiology and biostatistics deposit her datasets in your repository when, as Gerard van Westrienen and Clifford Lynch point out, the “UK has an extensive, sophisticated, and well-developed system of national repositories for data…” A repository that will put your meager collection of datasets to shame?

The questions may be painful, but had best be addressed head on. We, in this room, that is, had better role up our collective sleeves, as it were, and address questions of purpose. When a faculty member asks you “why do you exist” or “what is the point of your repository,” a flat and unflinching answer had best be on the tips of our tongues. Otherwise, they’ll turn away, lose interest, regret they asked the question in the first place.

**Key question revolves around the role of the IR in the community that is served. That is, is it a different vehicle for print publications? Housing for pre-print: grey literature or research reports? An excellent example here being ArXiv.org, It was started as an archive for preprints in physics but rapidly expanded an now contains 474,216 preprints. It is not peer-reviewed, per se, but uses an endorsement system whereby articles get approval or not--but that approval is content-based (subject content) and does not mean the article is free of errors or even accurate, though it is stated that the people who submit content are very conscientious. The point here is that it has become a "popular" archive in which to have your material, and as we all know, despite protestations to the contrary, faculty are not immune to fads: that is to say, popularity is a factor, so targeting big fish when filling your IR is not a bad idea. Related is the notion of Josephson, and that of censorship or blocking content.

Our Users

PowerPoint
Definitions of IR’s (all leading to the question—or observation—that the IR is defined in terms of the institution, not the people—only Lynch’s definition does this.)

Who are our users, and what do they want—and more importantly, perhaps, what do we want from them?
Begin by stating that when I started there was a considerable backlog of materials that needed to be addressed and this is just now under control so the focus on recruiting content is just about to begin.
Throughout the literature the effort to get content from faculty is given a singular weight and brooding menace that conjures to the mind Alexander Pope’s lines “When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw / the line too labors and the words move slow.” Indeed getting content from faculty has been compared to a Herculean effort, and the modest size of many IRs demonstrates that it may in fact be difficult: but as many writers suggest, it may be, too, that we who solicit for content from faculty aren’t approaching the matter in the right way.

“MIT hired a DSpace User Support Manager in order to work, in part, on content recruitment. When this strategy failed to reap the quantity of documents expected, the skills of a marketing expert were sought. Something seems amiss when even MIT, which arguably has the highest-profiled IR, and which has received national and international press, struggles to recruit content.” (Foster, 2005)
Three primary things that we can do, in my opinion, to court faculty properly; and as I discuss what I’ve found in the literature, I’ll mention what we’re doing at Case as well, then I’ll wrap up by discussing some other solutions that are being pushed.

Communication

Community Involvement

Financial Incentives

?
Slide 43

Communication

In their 2005 article Lynch and van Westrienen refer to “inhibitors or bottlenecks” in the process of getting faculty to place content in IRs. But for them it really boils down to informing faculty about the value of IRs.

Convincing them to contribute:

Libraries need to “articulate a case for why faculty should deposit their materials within the repository”

What’s in it for them? What do they get? Once again, I would state that appealing to some sense of altruism is poor salesmanship. It’s not that faculty don’t care about their institutions, or that they don’t realize their fate is intimately bound, in some cases, with that of the organization, but many might assert that their research and work is their contribution to the institution and they would be correct.

Availability and Visibility

We emphasizes that the material placed in Digital Case is there forever.

Backed up regularly to tape and archived

We emphasize that it is permanently accessible via a never-changing handle; (so there is no fear of publishing a link to the content)

Accessibility

Dissemination and propagation

Literature discussed submission processes that are cumbersome as a major inhibitor of contribution

At Case we use S3 a straight-forward form for submission, we handle the depositing and follow-up with any questions.

Slide 44

Emphasize the benefits:

timeliness:


Other value added services:

Slide 45

Dispel confusion and confront fears:

Literature suggests this is a major expectation for faculty; at Case we do not provide a method to restrict access, although the question has come up and we have discussed it.

Literature suggests that some institutions have added a search feature to the Advanced Search which allows for limiting to “peer reviewed” documents—and this note is added to the metadata.

We do not judge or measure the quality of the work that is deposited (any more than we do with books) –there is some initial judgment made, but it is a buyer beware scenario: as a researcher, you should be able to make careful judgments about what data you include in your work and should have some degree of pride in your own work.

Manage expectations

We emphasize that interface development falls on other parties and that, again, permanent handles can be used to link to material; OAI harvesting is an option as well.

Rochester

Slide 46
Community Involvement

Schools


Library Staff

Technology

Requisite knowledge

Slide 47

Financial incentives

At Case

We convert for you (Premium Services)

Research dollars

Belgium allocates research funding by repository contribution—thus the reason to deposit is “compelling”;

University of Minho at Portugal

Dean (provost at most universities) offered 99 Euros to a department for each item deposited as a reward. In 2004 there were 626 items in their IR, after one year of this program there were (2005) 3,105 items. In 2006, the Dean offered 30,000 Euros to the department to be distributed by percentage of ingest across departments.

Time is money:

File formats

Retain metadata (technical)
Automated metadata

Back to the Beginning

Per my opening statement, I believe that institutional repositories draw attention to human questions: the most fundamental perhaps being how we relate to each other, how we want to relate to each other, and how goals that are mutually beneficial and desirable can be achieved.

It is certain that vanity, pride, and personal opinions are a factor in IRs—both with us, presumably the people creating and operating them; and with the ‘others’ from whom we seek content. Frustrations are par for the course (be they intentional or not), politics, as with all things human, figures prominently, and failure is an option.

To mitigate the likelihood of that outcome, we need to keep your eye on what is important: not what is transitory or novel or necessarily easily obtained. We need to be acutely aware of the big picture (what is happening off camera—per the opening) and how it influences what we are trying to accomplish.

But perhaps most importantly of all, we need to be diligent, earnest and honest in our efforts, and sincere in our activities on behalf of both our institutions and the people that make them live.

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