Information Research Weblog

Here's an item that chimes in with Terry Brooks's latest column in Information Research, brought to my attention by Current Cites.

It's an article by Clifford Lynch (of the Coalition for Networked Information) on 'institutional repositories', that is, official, mainly university, archives of digital resources:

...a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.

Terry mentioned DSpace as one of the players in this area of activity, and another is ePrints from the University of Southampton in the UK - however, the latter is intended mainly for working papers and similar documents, whereas DSpace is intended for all digital content.

One of Lynch's comments rang bells:

Our institutions of higher education have overlooked an opportunity to support our most innovative and creative faculty for at least a decade now, to the detriment of both the faculty members and the institutions themselves. These faculty have been exploring ways in which works of authorship in the new digital medium can enhance teaching and learning and the communication of scholarship; such innovations are essential to keeping scholarship vital and effective, and they must not only be supported but nurtured. Indeed nurturing these innovations reaches to the core mission of our universities, and to the core values of our universities.

Read the rest - it's well worth the time.