What We Talk About When We Talk About Repositories

In this column, Mike Furlough writes about repositories from a user services perspective. His engaging and accessible article provides a fascinating history of repository hype, a primer on technical tools, and thoughtful reflections on the future of institutional repositories. Mike Furlough joined The Pennsylvania State University Libraries in 2006 as the assistant dean for Scholarly Communications and co-director of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing. Furlough's graduate training is in American Literature, but he ran away to join the University of Virginia Library, where he developed and led a number of services to support digital scholarship. He currently serves as a member of the Association of College and Research Libraries' Scholarly Communications Committee and begins editing a column on that topic for CR a vault or sepulchre." (1) "Institutional repository" (IR) often refers to a service that supports and encourages the deposit of student- and faculty-created materials, primarily open-access versions of research articles that have been formally published elsewhere or not at all. The early energy surrounding IRs centered on a hope that promoting open access could serve as a countermeasure to commercial publishing power and its ability to distort the market for knowledge. Taking control of our institutions' research by providing the ability to distribute this information to the world in an open-access mode seemed to be an inevitable outcome of the Internet. What follows is a brief history of IR hype. In July 2002, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported "'Superarchives' Could Hold All Scholarly Output: Online Collections by Institutions May Challenge the Role of Journal Publishers." (2) Also in 2002, a Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) position paper declared that institutional repositories--digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community.... provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a component that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them. (3) But in 2004 The Chronicle provided an update: "Papers Wanted: Online Archives Run by Universities Struggle to Attract Material." (4) IRs soon became the butt of jokes, even inside the community of practitioners. In March 2006, Dorothea Salo, an institutional repository manager, rechristened herself in her blog. …