CARL IR Meeting at Access 2008

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries hosed an Institutional Repository meeting in Hamilton Ontario on Wednesday October 1st, 2008 to coincide with Access 2008, and I was happy to be in attendance.

This was an extremely worthwhile meeting where participants were able to trade stories of their successes, challenges, and plans for the future. With over 40 of us in the room, it took almost the entire duration of the meeting to do a round of introductions discussing individual repositories. I sincerely hope that this becomes an annual event!

There were three major themes that emerged from the meeting:

Theme 1 – DSpace is commonly used, most institutions running 1.4 version

Most of the repositories in attendance were hosted using DSpace software.  I was very surprised to hear that most of the DSpace hosted repositories were versions of the 1.4 release, and that only two institutions had migrated to the 1.5 release.  I was slightly relieved because we finally completed our migration to 1.5 and I thought that we were behind!

As a result, the Manakin XML interface layer for DSpace was also not being used.  We were the only ones to have a production version of Manakin running.

Reasons cited for not migrating to 1.5 included:

• customizations made to DSpace 1.4 will take a lot of programming time to move over to 1.5
• certain plug-ins and enhancements that are in heavy use in 1.4 have not yet been made available for 1.5
• administrators are evaluating other platforms and are not willing to invest the time in upgrading to 1.5 if they end up switching platforms
• programmers are hard to find, train and retain

Please visit my follow-up post to this section that elaborates on these observations.

Theme 2 – Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

ETDs were discussed at length as they are very popular and make up a sizable percentage of most Canadian repository content.  Only one institution has mandated electronic thesis deposit, but many have effective relationships with their respective Graduate Faculties where procedures have been established to enable the depositing of theses into repositories on an ongoing basis.

Copyright has been tackled in many ways: seeking legal advice from campus legal counsel, sending letters to alumni, taking out an ad in institutional alumni magazines, and re-writing agreements to be signed by current graduates.

The availability of past Proquest theses were discussed but common problems were echoed:  poor quality scans for certain year ranges, Proquest marc records not tying to digital copies of theses by filename, lack of ocr, and the need to remove signature pages have slowed down workflow to ingest these items.

Theme 3 – Scholarly Communications Programs

Many of the participating institutions are hosting outreach programs to discuss Scholarly Communications challenges with faculty.  Efforts include hosting speaker events and creating websites/supporting materials.