Institutional Repositories (IR) are becoming critical vessels for showcasing research and scholarship. This is true for academic institutions of all sizes. Launching a repository demands significant financial and human capital. Without new resources, libraries must assess their ability to launch and sustain an IR. Olin College made the decision to create a repository in the summer of 2010. In this two-part piece I’m going to explore the staff side of our repository development.
Olin’s library has three full time staff members: the Director, a Public Services Librarian, and a Digital Services Librarian. We also have three work study students during the academic year, and one to two work study students during the summer. As the Director I take the lead for many of our new initiatives.
When evaluating Olin’s approach to an IR, I balanced our financial resources against our human resources. A change in our catalog consortium was going to save the library a significant sum. We would not, however, have the ability to hire new staff. Two basic IR approaches to consider were the open source approach with a platform such as DSpace, or the hosted system approach with a platform such as Berkeley Electronic Press (BE Press). For Olin, the decision was not difficult. We do not have programming or design expertise on staff, nor the staff time if we did have the expertise. With a shift in budget I was able to invest in BE Press. After talking through needs and specifications, the BE Press staff designed Olin’s interface and put our repository architecture into place.
Before we could build content, we still needed to collectively learn about the state of IRs, best practices, policies, and trends. I have an External Library Advisory Board, and I invited Marilyn Billings from UMass Amherst to join my board. UMass Amherst also uses the BE Press platform, and Marilyn has spearheaded their repository development. I spent a day at UMass, and Marilyn shared a great deal of information and introduced me to members of her team. I also learned about SPARC that day.
SPARC is the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, and was developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to address the imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. In addition to their advocacy role, they play a key education role for both librarians and the academic community of faculty & students. Institutions join SPARC and gain access to educational resources, regular broadcasts, programming and an international community of members working toward the same goals. Olin joined SPARC and I began listening to broadcasts and reading through guides.
Choosing a hosted system, forming relationships with outside experts and joining SPARC all helped me establish Olin Library’s IR platform and put our infrastructure and practices into place. In Part II I’ll talk about our use of staff to build content.
