Institutional Repository Investigative Task Force Meeting: December 6, 2017

CARLI Office, Champaign, IL

Members Present: Paul Blobaum (Governors State University); Cheri Cameron (Parkland College); Stephanie Davis-Kahl (Illinois Wesleyan University); John Dorr, chair (Northwestern University); Jonathan Nabe (Southern Illinois University Carbondale); Ken Orenic (College of DuPage); Kyle Rimkus (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Alexis Rogers (Lincoln Land Community College); Laurie Sauer (Knox College)

CARLI Staff Present: Elizabeth Clarage, Anne Craig, Amy Maroso

Meeting Notes

• Minutes taken by Kyle Rimkus.
• We have no formal agenda, but must address definition of IR, survey, and frequency of future meetings.
• The group made introductions.

Defining an IR

• The group discussed the scope of IR definition for the purposes of this project.
  • How open should it be? Stick to something very succinct, or open up for other needs (publishing, institutional digital asset management)?
  • Lynch definition is a good one (top of page 2 of https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2003/02/arl-br-226-Lynch-IRs-2003.pdf "In my view...")
    • Note: We are not all universities or even "academic institutions."
  • Do we need to scope language to stop people from using an IR like a DAMS?
    • Discussion: not necessarily.
  • Can the Lynch definition apply to our situation? If so we could doctor it to apply to our consortium?
    • It may need to specify that we are talking about a technology service including a platform, etc.
    • What would the model be? Offering a technology platform, but each institution would have to provide front-line management of it.
    • Notes: use phrases “services and technologies” and “academic and research libraries” are the phrases used by CARLI.
  • How do we specify the limits of user communities, as defined by each institution?
  • Rsp.ac.uk site has nice definitions of an IR, and language for discussing repositories.
• Survey may need to note that the IR is not meant to be a substitute for ContentDM, or replacement for it; At present, CARLI has no capacity to migrate from ContentDM.
  • At one point CARLI will have to migrate from locally hosted CDM to OCLC version.
  • ContentDM will never have external deposit/self-submission.
• In summary
  • For survey, wordsmith the Cliff Lynch statement, use some language from rsp.ac.uk “What is a repository?”, indicate that an IR is distinctly different from ContentDM for reasons above.
  • Anne: The diversity of CARLI institutions will pose a challenge to implementation; the task force should not forget smaller community colleges for example
  • The group decided to wordsmith the definition together rather than assign it.
    • Discussion: Do we want this effort to promote open access? Most institutions put a mix of open and restricted content in their IRs. This may be a campus by campus discussion.
    • CARLI Board sought a broad definition of IR for community colleges that aim to capture institutional output in a broad sense. This could include archival records of the institution to material that the faculty have developed and has something to do with research.
      • Community colleges focused not only on faculty output, but student output as well. Presentations, capstone projects, student journals. Collections are extraordinarily broad. For example, student graphic design capstone projects. How to showcase scholarly output of students that may not necessarily be research based. Many have a lot of multimedia content including videos and images.
      • A lot of IR stuff in community colleges is archives content, much more so than externally deposited scholarly materials.
      • Looking five years out, many small institutions are wondering whether they will even be able to sustain their own repositories.
      • Maybe keep the statement short and sweet.
• Possible survey question: do you anticipate using a repository for just your campus’s digital materials, or do you view this as an outreach opportunity to your external campus community?

The Survey

• There are questions among the task force members about the ContentDM service, where the line is between it and an IR; do we want to ask about that on the survey? Probably not, but we do want to specify that an IR would be distinct from ContentDM.
• For type of content, we may want to add:
  • Non-institutional community generated content
  • Administrative documents, faculty governance
  • Possibly another category for creative works
  • Add a separate category for ETDs
  • Possibly separate content/format
    • Kyle and Stephanie will regroup on the question of how to separate content from format in list of stuff.
    • They will also wordsmith the language around payment for participation in the service.
• (lunch break)
• What has prevented you from implementing IR?
  • Kyle and Stephanie will tease out the “lack of” options in survey.
  • Question of priority - often other things are considered higher priority; perhaps seek better wording or allow for comments
• Payment question clarification: Must be clear that we aren’t asking people to pay for access to content; but want people to understand there would be a fee for a service.
• General discussion of feature list to be included in survey.
• Recommendation: The survey should provide informational callouts/definitions for these items, or links out to the definitions or examples.
• In survey, do we want to ask how much stuff is in their repositories?
  • Yes, we will find the best place to add a question about how much stuff.
• May want to provide list of questions in advance.  This is the information you will need to have on hand to fill out the survey.
• Shoot for releasing the survey beginning of January. Perhaps do a targeted push of sending to directors as well as repository managers.
  • Or else send it out, and in second wave follow up with IR managers.
• Do survey and time ourselves to make sure we have it right.
• We will clean up the language, send it out for another pass.
• We will have another draft ready some time next week.
• Give people a month to respond, with ability to extend.
• We should have the questions done by December 15 for CARLI to put into Survey Monkey.
• Send it out week of January 8, end it in early February.
• March 9 is the Board Meeting; March 6 would be deadline for report.
• Survey: possibly ask people to provide link back to their institutional guidelines; but this can get very complicated very fast.
  • Board thinking here was: comparing what institutions have now vs what they may get in the future. This may be addressed by our asking so many questions about features and functions.
  • Or, optional question, if you have institutional guidelines or an FAQ, provide a link here

Next Steps

• We should look at the charge to assign out some of the tasks.
  • We may end up summarizing survey at the meeting, but not meeting every aspect of our charge -- so a partial report to the Board for their March meeting may be more fitting.
• Task force charge:
  • Item 1 - done
  • Item 2 - pending
  • Item 3 will be well covered by survey
  • Item 4 - John and Jonathan will do this
  • Item 5 - realistically the migration will be primarily away from Digital Commons; BePress supports and assists migration of metadata, but not files themselves.
    • Potentially a big problem (permissions challenges around communities, embargoes).
    • Kyle will write some here on potential issues; Paul will help too.
  • Item 6 - John will talk to Texas people about this, possibly others, BTAA geoportal (James Whitacre involved in Illinois).
    • Constellation is an IR of small private liberal arts schools; they don’t have dedicated staff.
    • Wisconsin may be one to talk to.
    • Focus on pitfalls, what is feasible
  • Item 7 - Specific language about cost will require some input from the Board

Next Meetings

January 24: conference call at 10-11.

February 14: All day (10-3) meeting at CARLI or Parkland. We may need a conference line as well

February 28: Conference call at 10-11.