The Research Library’s Role in Digital Repository Service – report
Posted by gazjjohnson on 6 February, 2009
The Research Library’s Role in Digital Repository Services, Final Report of the ARL Digital Repository Issues Task Force (January 2009), http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/repository-services-report.pdf
Might be worth a read for anyone with an interest in the repository world. I’ve run off a copy so if you need to borrow it. Best comment in the text so far, talking about the evolution of the repository scene:
We now understand better that institutions produce large and ever-growing quantities of data, images, multimedia works, learning objects, and digital records while mass digitization has launched a new scale of digital content collecting.
And then we have this:
…it is evident that despite the varied funding and resource challenges faced by research institutions, delivering repository services is a crucial function of research libraries.
There’s a lot of worthy content in here that whilst might be focussed on what’s going on in the US is worth noting that it’s always been my impression that they’re probably a year or more ahead of us in terms of general reposiotry developments. Certainly the section I’ve just been reading in the report about digital records management rang very true as an area the UK as a whole seems to have made very little progress in. We’re still at the garden-shed hobbyist level of repository management, still experimenting. In the meantime we do need to think about the real organisational impact of the repository on our institutions, and how we need to carefully shape how and where the repositories sit in all this.
I know I, for one, am still very much learning this.