RF6 Pecha Kucha: From Surviving to Thriving: Repositories in the Library-Based Publishing Ecosystem
Channel: OpenRepos2012
Date: 18/07/2012

This talk was a Pecha Kucha from Session RF6 at Open Repositories 2012 (http://or2012.blogs.edina.ac.uk/). 

"From Surviving to Thriving: Repositories in the Library-Based Publishing Ecosystem" - Robert Hilliker,  Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University, United States of America

This paper was originally proposed by Robert Hilliker, Mark Newton, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University, United States of America

Under-resourced, undirected, and lacking a clear value proposition, thus Dorothea Salo's "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel," captured the predicament of many first-generation library-based institutional repositories (IR) in the U.S. The lessons of "Innkeeper" have been hard-learned, and to properly address them requires investment, strategy, and service vision far beyond one that establishes the IR as a standalone service managed by a maverick manger, or a part of one. To fully realize the vision of the IR as the essential infrastructure (Lynch 2003) for the seat of scholarly communication services on campus and to overcome the early stumbles across the community, a more holistic approach to service provision is required.

Institutional digital repositories, because they offer both preservation and access, make fine partners for emergent library-publishing programs offering a suite of services. We offer a detailed case study of Columbia University's digital repository, Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.columbia.edu), showing how its placement within Columbia's Center for Digital Research and Scholarship has helped us double in size within a single year, provided us with strong partner relationships that have furthered the discussion of Open Access on campus, and even helped the Center itself generate increased interest in its services, all while giving Columbia University Libraries' subject librarians additional tools that they can deploy to better serve their departments.