Dorothea Salo

Innkeeper at the Roach Motel

Library-run institutional repositories face a crossroads: adapt or die. The “build it and they will come” proposition has been decisively proven wrong. Citation advantages and preservation have not attracted faculty participants, though current-generation software and services offer faculty little else. Academic librarianship has not supported repositories or their managers. Most libraries consistently under-resource and understaff repositories, further worsening the participation gap. Software and services have been wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management. These problems are not insoluble, especially in light of Harvard University arts and science faculty’s recent permissions mandate, but they demand serious reconsideration of repository missions, goals, and means if we are to be ready for Harvard imitators, and especially to be ready should those imitators not surface.

Name Authority Control in Institutional Repositories

Neither the standards nor the software underlying institutional repositories anticipated performing name authority control on widely disparate metadata from highly unreliable sources. Without it, though, both machines and humans are stymied in their efforts to access and aggregate information by author. Many organizations are awakening to the problems and possibilities of name authority control, but without better coordination, their efforts will only confuse matters further. Local heuristics-based name-disambiguation software may help those repository managers who can implement it. For the time being, however, most repository managers can only control their own name lists as best they can after deposit while they advocate for better systems and services.

How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative

Since Clifford Lynch’s infamous call to arms (2003), academic libraries have been wasting their time trying to change the scholarly communication system on the feeblest of rationalizations. Proper librarians know that the current system is obviously the most sustainable, since it’s lasted this long and provided so much benefit to libraries (Rogers, 2012a) and profit to organizations as diverse as Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, and the American Chemical Society, as well as their CEOs (Berrett, 2012). Moreover, faculty have proclaimed loudly and clearly that they believe libraries’ central role is to be the campus’s collective knowledge wallet (Schonfeld & Housewright, 2010; Lucky, 2012), so who are librarians to argue?

On the mark? Responses to a sting

It all seems very simple. A researcher writes up her findings to share them with her community. The findings are sent to a journal where the editor sends the manuscript out to peers to read. The reviewers comment and return the manuscript to the editor. The editor either asks the researcher to address the comments, or rejects the manuscript based on the reviews. The researcher sends their final manuscript to the editor, who in turn works with the publisher to ensure dissemination. Done.

What are we talking about when we talk about sustainability of digital archives, repositories and libraries?

This paper reports on how LIS authors depict the concept of sustainability of digital archives, repositories and libraries in English language texts from 2000‐ 2015 indexed in three major LIS databases. Our results show that sustainability is not as popular a topic as one might expect. Results show that most authors discuss sustainability at a superficial level rather than in‐depth. Sustainability is a multi‐faceted concept, and we explore the prevalence of nine codes, representing different facets of sustainability, in the texts. We found most authors discussed sustainability in terms of technology, management, relationships or revenue. Fewer described assessment, disaster planning or policy facets. We also describe the range and variation in subthemes we encountered within each code. We conclude with suggestions for advancing conversation about organizational sustainability in the LIS literature.

Who owns our work

Based on a paper presented at the 33rd UKSG Conference, Edinburgh, April 2010 Much turmoil in the scholarly-communication ecosystem appears to revolve around simple ownership of intellectual property. Unpacking that notion, however, produces a fascinating tangle of stakeholders, desires, products and struggles. Some products of the research process, especially novel ones, are difficult to fit into legal concepts of ownership. As collaborative research burgeons, traditional ownership and authorship criteria are stretched to their limits and beyond, with many contributors still feeling short of due credit. The desire for access and impact brings institutions and grant funders into the formerly exclusive relationship between authors and publishers. Librarians, stripped of first-sale rights by electronic licensing, wonder about both access and long-term preservation. Emerging solutions to many of these difficulties threaten to cut publishers out of the picture altogether, perhaps a welcome change to those stakeholders who find publishers’ behavior to block progress.

Dorothea Salo Responds

I thank Dr. Smiraglia for his kind remarks. I note that MINDS@UW is a poor test subject for the incidence of name variants in institutional repositories, because (as I note in my article) I have made significant and ongoing efforts to eradicate name variants. I believe OAIster would be a much improved test case. I agree that the common practice among journals of shortening names to initials is an important cause of name variation. As for the numerical relationships between authors and works, I would expect many more journal article authors than book authors to be responsible for more than one work. One common technique for filling institutional repositories—performing rights checks on an entire CV and ingesting whatever can be legally self-archived—also tends to increase the number of works per author. Again, OAIster might well be fruitful ground for further research. The results of clicking on a name variant in an institutional repository are dependent on the behavior of the underlying software platform. DSpace, when altered to make author names clickable, behaves as I described in the article; it has no ability to guess what name-string variants belong to the same author. I agree that this would be useful functionality.