I realize I haven’t yet talked about my fall project, mostly because it was held up by paperwork for the first month or so. But now that it’s in full swing, I should probably introduce it. This summer, the University Libraries and DLS chose bepress to be their institutional repository management and e-journal hosting platform. Friend/fellow Joanna (who I shall no longer link out to because of her extreme awesomeness and our unfortunate but unavoidable race to find a job in the cutthroat field of digital librarianship) and I attended an excellent conference on IRs and open access this summer and were chomping at the bit to participate in this fall’s bepress implementation project. The original goal for the project was to build faculty web pages for three departments using bepress’ Selected Works service, seed the university’s new Digital Commons repository with publications posted on those faculty pages, and set up two or three local e-journal prototypes using bepress’ EdiKit service. (More about all of these services in a later post.) We would also be exploring possible workflows for all of these tasks as well as researching IR policies and faculty outreach.
Before I get ahead of myself, I want to give a little background on institutional repositories, Open Access, and the conference from this summer. The Open Access (OA) movement grew out of the increasing demand to break the monetary restrictions on online scholarly research articles and other materials and to make them freely accessible to everyone, the main benefit being to share knowledge for the advancement of scientific and scholarly research, especially in developing countries. OA is delivered in at least one of two methods, the “gold road” or the “green road.” On the “gold road” journals themselves are open access, making articles freely accessible from the time of publication. On the “green road” authors self-archive their publications in an OA online repository, usually disciplinary or institutional. Institutional repositories (IR) collect, preserve, and provide access to the intellectual output of an institution, usually a research university. The University of Iowa is one of many institutions around the world starting to build repositories.
ELPUB 2008, aka the International Conference on Electronic Publishing, was held this June in Toronto (the first time ever held in North America). This year’s theme was “Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0.” Repository administrators, librarians, researchers, and publishers from over 20 countries met to share expertise, frustrations, and ideas for solutions to the challenges facing OA and repositories. Joanna and I arrived early to catch two great workshops, one on eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), an open source indexing and querying tool, presented by the amiable folks from the California Digital Library, and a brainstorming session with repository managers from around the world on attacking the obstacles standing in the way of successful repositories. (It was amazing to find how many of these issues could be remedied by a standard for persistent digital identities.) Keynotes by John Willinsky and Stevan Harnad, OA champions, were inspirational and provided context for a field which I up until that point knew little about. In the conference sessions we learned lots about added-value services, repositories in developing countries, and sustainable OA scholarly publishing models. Everyone we met was genuinely interested in sharing their professional experiences with newbies like us and seemed excited that two library students came to the conference to learn about OA and IRs.
Still glowing with post-conference buzz at the beginning of the semester, Joanna and I met with our mentor Wendy to start preparing for the arrival of bepress, which we were told was to happen very soon… (to be continued)
