taking a cue from "IT Doesn't Matter"

Several years ago, Nicolas Carr made quite a stir with his article in the Harvard Business Review entitled "IT Doesn't Matter." His main argument was (and still is) that while IT is essential it is not strategic. According to Carr, companies can't gain strategic advantage from their systems because everyone is running the same systems. Over the last several years, many have either endorsed or refuted Carr's views.

Until recently, it hadn't occurred to me how this might relate to libraries, but after reading an article by Paul Ingevaldson, it seems to me that libraries are facing the same issues that IT does. Almost all libraries run the same systems, often with little or no customization other than changing the colors of the web pages to match the organization identity. Librarians haven't traditionally thought about how what they do contributes to what the corporate sector calls "strategic advantage" - that is, aligning the outcomes of the library to the outcomes of the larger organization they are part of. We often see our libraries as entities unto themselves.

This kind of thinking has to change. To be successful, libraries have to differentiate their services from what can be obtained elsewhere. As has been the case in IT, a lot of the benefits traditional services provided are now commodity items that are moving to self-service models because they're so automated they do not require the high level of expertise they did in the past. This is happening whether we like it or not.

What savvy IT departments do today is develop custom services and applications that work directly with the unique strategy of the organization. Libraries need to take a cue from this and do the same for their organizations as well.

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.