Institutional Repositories and Research Priorities

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Melanie Bates wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

"The Learning Technology world discovers the Digital Library world and it makes an enormous discovery. That the librarians are storing, cataloguing and managing research content in one place using FREE software. Not only is this software FREE but it is being adopted by almost simultaneously by many Institutions in the UK and around the world - hey even Google are doing it, ... it must be the next big thing! And so the 'Institutional Repository' is born."

If anyone is interested in the history, provenance and motivation of all this free software, hence of the "IR" movement itself, they will find it in this October 2000 D-lib item and this August 2001 SPARC E-News item.

This is not by way of touting Southampton's causal role, but by way of suggesting that the fact that OA and OAI were the source of IRs might just have something to do with what IRs should be used for (as a matter of first and urgent priority).

It is not that storing and preserving every digitised object under the sun is not a good idea. It is just a question of priorities. For universities and research institutions, the immediate priority is this: Scholarly and scientific research usage and impact have been needlessly lost, cumulatively, since paper publication first began, because paper costs and distribution necessarily meant that many would-be users could not afford to access and use most research output. This has always meant a great loss of potential research impact and hence research progress to researchers, their institutions, and to research itself.

Ever since the creation of the Internet, however, with FTP, the Web, and now OAI-compliant OA IR software and IRs, this annual research-impact bleed can in fact be stanched. Yet the bleed is still being stanched spontaneously for only about 15% of the planet's annual research output today; 85% of it is still being lost, daily, and cumulatively. This continuing bleed is hence a needless loss to the planet's research institutions, the primary consumers of research findings, whose daily bread (pardon the messy, mixed metaphor!) is research impact and progress (and funding), as well as to the planet's teaching/learning institutions, the secondary consumers of research knowledge and progess, and of course each nation's tax-payers, the tertiary consumers of research applications and benefits, who also happen to be the funders of much of the research.

So, to repeat, whereas there is no doubt a worthy and worthwhile agenda to be pursued in ensuring the long-term storage and preservation of all institutional digital output (and input), there is still some acute and chronic bleeding to be stanched (85%) as a matter of urgent priority.

Until the digital era, the intrinsic limitations of paper itself were the cause of the unstoppable hemorrhaging of daily research usage, impact and progress. Please let us not now make diffuse digital conservationism (a worthy and worthwhile pursuit) into its digital-era cause, through neglect or distraction. Let us stanch the bleeding immediately, as a matter of priority, and then get on with the generic digital preservation agenda.

Stevan Harnad