If content is king,
where’s the castle?
Scott Siddall
siddall@denison.edu

King’s Castle is the Content Repository
Why are we talking about repositories?
Who’s in charge?

What’s a repository?
“…a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution." (Lynch, 2003)

Why repositories?
Our responsibility as stewards of IP
Credit and recognition
Showcase scholarship for recruitment
Pressures of the open access movement
Ensure our work products as legacies
Communicate our research and creativity
Publish our research and creativity
Document our processes

All kind and manner of repositories
Institutional
Personal
Consortial
Disciplinary
Research
Emeriti
Curricular
Etc., etc., etc.

What’s in it?
articles
books and theses
primary data and
         associated files
video, music and rich media
course materials
Any digital content: blobs

Who contributes?
Faculty
Preprints, postprints
Data
Curricular materials
Research reports
Students
Theses
Eportfolios
Staff
Special collections
Institutional data
Minutes
Emeriti
Legacy collections
And more….

Who’s in charge?
Ownership vs leadership
Control
Funding

The ‘big’ issues
Purpose of the repository
Alignment with mission
Uncertainty about intellectual property issues
Faculty incentives to contribute;  scholarly credit
Selection of unique content
Need for collaborative planning
Commitment to archiving and preservation
Costs and quality of metadata

The ‘big’ issues

Tools to build the castle
DSpace
Eprints
Fedora
Local software projects

Centralization, control and Web 2.0
Web ‘sites’ have become applications
Information services that can be mashed
Distributed content and management
Interactive user interfaces
Open access

New tools to build the castle
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
Personal websites --> blogging
Screen scraping, batch uploads --> web services
Publishing --> participation
Content management systems --> wikis
Directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
Stickiness --> syndication

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Beyond the repository

Integrating the repository

Integrating the repository

Integrating the repository

One big castle?
Federated searches across many collections
Harvesting collections (OAI) or even the desktop (P2P)
Combining content from local and remote collections
Integrating content into CMS

No one has “the sauce”
Another reason to collaborate
Within the institution – library, faculty, technology
Beyond the institution – open source, community source
DSpace and Fedora Commons following the Sakai Foundation model

Addendum
Repository Project Planning
Goals
Resources
Processes
Challenges

Planning questions – goals
Is there a unifying goal for the project, or multiple goals?
What are the relative proportions of institutional vs faculty collections?
Conservatively, what percentage of the faculty collections are unique, legally sharable?
What role might student scholarship and creative work play?
What other institutional records might be catalogued?
How can/should the collection be shared (policies in addition to technologies)?

Planning questions - resources
What digital collections do you have now and how complete are they?
Are there capital and human resources to support an IR?
What facilities (scanning, software, storage, backup and bandwidth) are available?
What might be the role of outsourcing in the project (hosting, digitization)?
How will you avoid vendor or technology “lock-in”
Are there any donors or corporate connections on the horizon?

Planning questions - processes
Is your academic leadership committed to supporting this effort?
What are the possibilities for collaboration?
What role might students in the majors have in initial metadata creation?
Are there regional repositories for specialized collections? Do they share metadata schema?
What are the possibilities for federated searching and OAI harvesting?

Planning questions - challenges
What are the real and perceived barriers to the project?
What are/might be the incentives for faculty to contribute?
How will projects be prioritized for inclusion?
What level of quality can you afford?
Is there a campus policy on intellectual property that favors this project?
How will the faculty (or institutional) collections be maintained?

Discussion
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