Re: D-Lib article about Cornell's Institutional Repository

[Eric Hellman <eric@openly.com>]

In the same issue of D-Lib is an article about an innovation in 
Institutional Repositories I think will may go a long way to 
address the issues pointed to in Davis& Cnnolly's article. 
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/sugita/03sugita.html

I had a small part in this work- the bulk of the credit should go 
to our collaborators in Japan. Basically, they looked at how 
scholars were accessing information and realized that 
incorporating content from institutional repositories into 
institutional linking services was a crucial step in making the 
repositories meaningful to faculty members.

not even a detour if you're going there anyway!

Eric


> Worth a detour:
>
> <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html>
>
> D-Lib Magazine
> March/April 2007
> Volume 13 Number 3/4
>
> ISSN 1082-9873
> Institutional Repositories
> Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of
> DSpace, by
>
> Philip M. Davis
> Cornell University
> <pmd8@cornell.edu> (corresponding author)
>
> Matthew J. L. Connolly
> Cornell University
> <mjc12@cornell.edu>
>
> Abstract
>
> Problem: While there has been considerable attention dedicated to the
> development and implementation of institutional repositories, there has
> been little done to evaluate them, especially with regards to faculty
> participation.
>
> Purpose: This article reports on a three-part evaluative study of
> institutional repositories. We describe the contents and
> participation in Cornell's DSpace and compare these results with
> seven university DSpace installations. Through in-depth interviews
> with eleven faculty members in the sciences, social sciences and
> humanities, we explore their attitudes, motivations, and behaviors
> for non-participation in institutional repositories.
>
> Results: Cornell's DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by
> its faculty. Many of its collections are empty, and most collections
> contain few items. Those collections that experience steady growth
> are collections in which the university has made an administrative
> investment, such are requiring deposits of theses and dissertations
> into DSpace. Cornell faculty have little knowledge of and little
> motivation to use DSpace. Many faculty use alternatives to
> institutional repositories, such as their personal Web pages and
> disciplinary repositories, which are perceived to have higher
> community salience than one's affiliate institution. Faculty gave
> many reasons for not using repositories: redundancy with other modes
> of disseminating information, the learning curve, confusion with
> copyright, fear of plagiarism and having one's work scooped,
> associating one's work with inconsistent quality, and concerns about
> whether posting a manuscript constitutes "publishing".
>
> Conclusion: While some librarians perceive a crisis in scholarly
> communication as a crisis in access to the literature, Cornell
> faculty perceive this essentially as a non-issue. Each discipline
> has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and
> traditions. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture
> and preserve the scholarship of one's faculty, institutional
> repositories will need to address this cultural diversity.
>
> ####