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Re: Functioning IRs - today's real realities

Steve: You are describing a set of fairly brief comments I made on a conference panel a couple of months ago. I noted that when an institution wants and needs a substantial IR, with ability to handle numerous types of complicated data and documents, in size and scale, in service to numerous projects and individuals across the university, and so on (see the URL with the text), one has to make a sizeable investment to get all that. If the needs are simpler, the costs will be lower and turnkey solutions are indeed available, from eprints, BMC, ProQuest, and probably others. Sincerely, Ann Okerson/Yale Library

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Steve Hitchcock wrote:

*Cross posted*

Ann Okerson has published a curiously-titled short note about IRs in the
latest issue of INASP Newsletter:
Institutional repositories - today's realities
http://www.inasp.info/newslet/nov05.shtml#8

In it she lists an extended range of functions for an IR, then admits there
are currently no turnkey solutions to support this list, only partial
solutions, and that this specification is costly: "three-year start-up costs
for hardware and software alone are over $300,000", without including staff
costs apparently. This is surely way beyond the costs supportable by INASP's
constituency, and probably most other institutions too who just want to get
an IR up and running quickly at low cost.

Today's realities are quite different. There is an alternative that will
provide a functioning IR to capture and make accessible all the research
outputs of an institution at a fraction of Ann's quoted cost. It's based on
EPrints, the original IR software, a focussed IR solution that works now, but
isn't mentioned in Ann's note.

Although EPrints is free, open source software, there are costs attached to
running an IR, but institutions should not be put off by excessive cost
projections. To prove it the newly launched EPrints Services team offers a
range of service packages from supporting local hosting to a fully hosted
service http://www.eprints.org/services/sales/ This approach also goes some
way to reducing an institution's risk on costs.

To understand why IRs are needed and how to build one, Professor Arthur Sale,
a developer of software to measure usage of IRs, offers a practical approach
http://www.eprints.org/news/features/worlds_best_practice.php

Ann is not alone in advocating more complex and costly DL-inspired
functionality for IRs, and it will arrive, but these investigations can be
left to others for now. This is how Arthur Sale puts it: "Can people fly
flags and ring bells over conquering Everest when it turns out to be Highgate
Hill?"

Steve Hitchcock
EPrints Community Manager
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
http://www.eprints.org/community/