1. Institutional Repositories: The Beginning of the Journey Sayeed Choudhury Utah State IR Conference September 30, 2009

2. Two Quotes “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao-tzu, Chinese philosopher “No other movement has had more promise or has delivered less on that promise than institutional repositories.” – Greg Crane, Bostonian philosopher (actually Editor-in-Chief for Perseus Project)

3. Beginning of the Journey IRs as part of scholarly transformation (Rick Johnson) IRs as a set of services (Cliff Lynch) IRs as preservation systems (DSpace) IRs became a collection development mechanism “Technology alone cannot engender transformation” - Sayeed Choudhury

4. Where are we now? Some notable successes but… Also equal number (perhaps even more?) cases of difficulty with engaging faculty or gathering content Scope creep – Is DSpace really being used as a preservation system or an asset management system? Is Fedora being used to support different types of access?

5. Return to First Principles What are we trying to accomplish? What is our “elevator pitch” for IRs? Who is our audience? Who are our customers? What are their requirements? What services are we trying to support? How do we choose, build, and integrate systems into infrastructure?

6. Scholarly Communication While IRs may not have changed scholarly communication, scholarly communication has certainly changed in the last few years Typically think of open access, which is true, but I am referring to deeper changes that occur earlier in the chain Fundamental changes related to data as the new foundational element

7. Data Flow (Levels of Data) Pixel data collected by telescope Sent to Fermilab for processing Beowulf Cluster produces catalog Loaded in a SQL database

8. Data Model using OAI-ORE

9. Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)

10. Institutional Repositories Institutional repositories are nodes on the distributed infrastructure for new forms of scholarly communication. They are a set of services that support the preservation and access to institutional collections, particularly unique or special collections.

11. Remember Gopher? 15 year ago, some of us might have still been running Gopher servers. How many of us are still running Gopher servers? While Gopher servers don’t provide access, the content was transferable onto the Web? Do we think we’ll be running DSpace or Fedora (to choose your favorite IR software) 10-15 years from now?

12. Acknowledgements Alex Szalay (Data Flow slide) Tim DiLauro and David Reynolds (OAI-ORE) NLG grant award LG0606018206 DataNet award for “The Data Conservancy”