The college I work at participates in LASR, but as its development started well before I got there, so I stepped into this panel session to get a bigger-picture view of how this project was conceived and how it’s being developed for the future. 

Institutional repositories (IRs) have already come up in the session I attended earlier this morning and in sessions I’ve read blog posts about. For the past several years, they’ve been a basket in which we are placing a lot of effort and expectation, and that trend seems to be only increasing. The LASR panel session told one story of how an IR was created to serve a specific set of users. 

Key points about LASR development:

–its development  is collaborative and distributed–librarians at the eight participating liberal arts colleges obtained funding for short, intensive f2f meetings and continued work individually at their home institutions

–distributed development allowed the group to tap into a wide range of talents–there were people to specialize in planning, tech needs (software, metadata), and policy needs

–it was focused to the needs of liberal arts students and faculty, had an eye to broader consortial initiatives (connecting technology to liberal arts teaching) and this helped it get the financial support needed to sustain long-distance collaboration

–from the beginning, LASR librarians strategized content recruitment, but even this clear focus on growing the collection has not made it easy to grow the collection

Growing IRs clearly takes persistence and flexibility. For example, the presenters talked about how they  thought that, in the context of their mission, the low hanging fruit would be student work. This led to a thicket of evaluation and fairness concerns: student work ranges in quality, and there is no clear mechanism for making a consistent call, such as journal peer review for faculty work. We can seek administrative mandates for archiving particular categories of student work–eg comprehensive papers–but there is always a range of finished-ness and readiness for prime time. The last thing we want is for students to fear the IR and feel embarrassed about the work that represents them there. New options have to be considered, perhaps the creation of a student editorial board to self-mediate what represents their school on the web. 

How much energy do we devote to IRs now, when there might not be a ready stream of content? As anyone who reads IR bloggers knows, it’s a frustrating and time consuming job to build and promote something that seems to resist growth. Flip that question the other way, and we can ask how our IRs will become the powerful tool we want them to be when “they are everyone’s responsibility and nobody’s job,” in the words of one presenter?