I should reiterate, in case you're just joining me, that this blog basically presents my impressions from the Open Repositories conference. It is not intended to be comprehensive -- nor could it be, since many sessions run concurrently. Enjoy!
day two, session one : digital preservation and archiving
It would seem that a great deal of work is still needed in the area of digital preservation. As one presenter pointed out, repository managers have plenty to do already without worrying about preservation, which is another discipline unto itself. I do wonder how many of us have digital preservation plans in place.
I enjoyed learning about the KeepIt project, an 18-month training project that is nearing completion in the U.K. It was reminiscent of the ICPSR digital preservation workshop I attended last fall, except it went much further, engaging the members over the several months and working with different tools to help aid in preservation activities. There seem to be an awful lot of possible preservation tools out there, but whether they work for your institution's needs is another question entirely. To that point, a presentation from the archives community described the challenges inherent in migrating traditional archiving habits to fit our digital world. While archivists are used to basing their archival descriptions on locations -- "Mr. Green's work is in Room B, Row 7, Box C, File 71" -- obviously, digital archives do not work this way. I thought before, and I think again, that it's a shame libraries and archives are not working more closely together on these questions, because in many ways we are asking the same questions, and it would help if we worked together. The idea of using OAI-ORE to link EAD records together was presented, and refuted by a couple of audience members who questioned whether this was a viable solution.
I thought it was an interesting point that while we think we are putting all of our resources in one place when we start an institutional repository, in fact we have resources in many, many places: course descriptions on the university website or catalog; syllabi in the course management system; student papers may or may not be in the repository; faculty papers may or may not be in the repository; other faculty work is most surely on a blog, wiki, or personal website someplace. So we're not keeping all of our records in one place, at all. But my question is: should we?
break - Back to the soda machine. And actually , it was nice in that I met someone who remembered my name because I was one of the few people with questions at a webinar she presented. That was too funny.
day two, session two : academic workflows
Generally speaking, this was a show-and-tell session for different tools and processes being used at the speakers' respective institutions. I think back to some of these from the last conference, which I was able to view online, and I have to think that it's really too bad more of these ideas aren't integrated directly into the software packages. I know why, of course -- one must really commit oneself as a developer to do such a thing, and most of us don't have the time or institutional support to do such things. It's really a shame. Sometimes the open source community feels just a bit like an incredibly intelligent, innovative octopus with unlimited tentacles and no brain. And just so no one is upset by my "no brain" statement -- by brain, I mean central leadership to pull all of the ideas in all of the different tentacles together.
And what's this talk about people who might want to publish in more than one repository? I've heard this idea more than once today. Ridiculous. Imagine how unwieldy that could get, and how completely unnecessary. If you must have a record, just point to the identifier of the object where it already lives in someone else's repository. Done.
lunch
Of course I have to write about lunch again. I had a very enjoyable luncheon with Deborah Kaplan from Tufts University. Lunch was much more efficiently served today -- it seemed yesterday we spent a lot of time waiting for each course, but today was whisk! whisk! whisk! very prompt. And tasty -- a small fish salad-type course, a main course of salmon, and dessert. And wine. Of course. Kudos to the Palacio de Congresos staff.
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