[BOAI] Q&A with CNI's Clifford Lynch: Time to re-think the institutional repository?

[Richard Poynder]

Seventeen years ago 25 people gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to discuss
ways in which the growing number of e-print servers and digital repositories
could be made interoperable.

 

As scholarly archives and repositories had begun to proliferate a number of
issues had arisen. There was a concern, for instance, that archives would
needlessly replicate each other's content, and that users would have to
learn multiple interfaces in order to use them. What was therefore needed
was to develop tools and protocols that would allow repositories to work in
concert on a distributed basis. Above all, there was a need to make
distributed archives interoperable so that their content could be aggregated
into a single searchable virtual archive of (eventually) all published
research. 

 

The meeting led to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and to the institutional repository movement. Today
there are thousands of institutional repositories around the world.

 

Yet 17 years later the interoperability promised by OAI-PMH has not really
materialised, few third-party service providers have emerged to leverage the
content in repositories, and duplication has not been avoided. Moreover, to
the exasperation of green OA advocates, authors have proved reluctant to
take on the task of depositing their papers in these repositories. Some
therefore now believe that the institutional repository faces an existential
threat. At the very least, they say, it is time to rethink the role and
purpose of the institutional repository. 

 

These and other matters are discussed in an interview with Clifford Lynch,
director of the Washington-based Coalition for Networked Information and one
of those who attended the Santa Fe meeting. 

 

The Q&A (plus introduction) can be accessed here:
http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/q-with-cnis-clifford-lynch-time-to-re_
22.html

 

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