refocusing our attention in the world of institutional repositories

Dorothea Salo's recent post in Caveat Lector is just the latest thing to remind us what we've known for some time now - that the successful institutional repositories (IRs) are those where the library has been proactive in soliciting content and has actively taken responsibility for doing all the work to get the content into the IR. Even so, success in IRs must be thought of in terms of modest acquisitions since no IR has truly taken off the way their planners had hoped. Part of this seems to be related to the work libraries have to do to convince faculty that an institutional repository is a worthwhile endeavor. This reluctance to engage with an IR effort seems to be mainly because the incentives to faculty just aren't obvious to most of them. In general, faculty don't see longevity as an issue for their published material, whether that's reflective of reality or not. The biggest gains that have been documented in relationship to gathering faculty contributions have been in grey literature.

What I found somewhat discouraging about Salo's post is the apparent ambivalence toward student contributions. We tend to forget that a lot of the emergent research in our institutions is conducted by students. This is reflected in the reality of most IRs where the majority of contributions are, in fact, from students in one form or another. McDowell's article in the latest issue of D-Lib is just the latest study to document this.

Perhaps, if we focus on what is meaningful to faculty and students, rather than what is of interest to us as librarians, we might be more successful in getting participation in our IRs.