Ruthven, Tom

The Australian National University

The brave new world of libraries andrepositoriesTom RuthvenExecutive OfficerAustralian Partnership for Sustainable RepositoriesI thought I’d start with the last word in the title of my paper and work my way backwards, notbecause of some strange sense of style but because “brave” is such a big word compared torepository.What is a repository?H. Frank Cervone has neatly described an institutional repository as “software and servicesthat manage and disseminate digital materials for an entire institution”1.  All things are equalin this definition.  Repositories have as much emphasis on dissemination of material asmanaging the material.Generally, repositories are being established in research institutions.  The type of materialthey want to keep is scholarly in nature but scholarly in a very broad sense.  There may be theoutput of research such as e-prints and theses.  There can be research data such as songsrecorded by an anthropologist on a field trip, recordings of music performances or data froman electron microscope.  Printed material may have been digitised such as sheet music orgeological maps.  The repository may also contain teaching material, complete e-books, andresearch published as websites.  Image, sound, data, text and multi-media works can beincluded in what can end up being a bewildering array of intertwined possibilities.However, at their heart, repositories are a response to the changes in the way researchers aregoing about their work.  Researchers are creating data digitally, communicating digitally, andincreasingly publishing the results of their research digitally.The management and dissemination of the digital material for scholars and researchers arethe two building blocks of repositories.  MacKenzie Smith has spoken of repositories as“cumulative and perpetual” and “open and interoperable”2, and Clifford Lynch talks of theessential commitment of a repository “to the stewardship of these digital materials, includinglong-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access ordistribution.”3  The new worldThe new world of repositories, in many ways, looks remarkably like the existing world oflibraries.  Material or content is obtained, access is provided, and there is a commitment andeffort made towards preservation.Content is one of the keystones of any service, whether it is a library, an archive or yourcorner store, and this content must be good!  As Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey have1 Cervone, H. Frank, The repository adventure.  The library journal, June 1, 20042 Smith, MacKenzie, Libraries in the lead: the institutional repository phenomenon.3 Lynch, Clifford A, Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the DigitalAge.  ARL Bimonthly Report 226, February 2003. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html1stated for repositories: “where coverage is intermittent and/or unpredictable, usefulness isdiminished and stakeholder interest will not grow”4.  Developing content for a repository primarily relies on researchers adding their material, andenticements are needed for this to occur.  Keeping research material safe and for a long timeis a key enticement for researchers, but making it easy to contribute goes hand-in-hand withthis.  Researchers often (and usually) have large amounts of existing material they want toadd. They may have used standard and not-so-standard digital formats or it may be in ananalogue format that they need to digitise first.  Providing simple loading mechanisms mustcover the bulk transfer of existing material and small groups of newly created material.Providing advice on equipment, standards and the amount of effort needed can be seen as anadjunct to developing the content. For example, you might get asked about the best hand-helddigital sound recorder to record folkloric music in the field, or what standards should be usedwhen digitising sheet music, or what is the absolute minimum information needed to put in adescription of an e-print journal article.  Even providing costing models for their next grantapplication to cover the creation and description of digital material would be of benefit to aresearcher.Another enticement is the increase in the visibility of their research output, and theconsequent value that can be added to their material.  Providing one front-end to accessmaterial in a repository framework is not enough.  Material in a repository is “open”,meaning it is there to be shared.  A repository makes it possible for a researcher’s output tobe seen through many lenses.  A piece of music can be found by searching the repository orthat organisation’s website, but it might also be linked to from an article by the composer thatappears in an electronic journal published in Italy, a criticism of the piece in an electronicjournal published in Canada, or it can be harvested to appear in other services such asMusicAustralia.A repository extends finding into sharing.  Different sound recordings of one piece of musiccan be on various repositories around the world and a researcher can access and use them fortheir analysis without leaving their desk.  Material from different areas of one repository, ordifferent repositories, can be combined in a new ways to produce new publications orresearch data.  These types of activities rely on repositories working out how to make thematerial “viewable” without the need for special software or equipment.  A researcher doesnot want to load six different types of sound recording players on their PC to listen to piecesof music from six different repositories.Finally, repositories lay claim to keeping material safe.  I will address this shortly, but first Iwant to look at where libraries fit into this world that is part archival, part dissemination, partproselytiser.What is a library?Libraries have always assisted researchers communicate by getting and providing access tomaterial; assisting them to find the information they want; and providing support services fortheir research and teaching needs.  Repositories build on these strengths.The research libraries’ current role in collecting and keeping information continues into thedigital world.  Collecting and making theses available has long been seen as part of auniversity’s obligation.  Having an early version of an electronic score by a current composerin a library’s collection may be of much interest to researchers as a manuscript version of4 Lavoie, Brian and Dempsey, Lorcan, Thirteen ways of looking at…digital preservation, D-Libmagazine, vol. 10, no. 7/8, http://dlib.ejournal.ascc.net/dlib/july04/lavoie/07lavoie.html2Mozart’s Requiem.  And, keeping regimental war diaries in a research collection is of interestwhether they are written on paper or were stored on a palm-pilot.  However, a repository caninclude much more than would normally be considered “library” material.  For example, it isnot normal for a library to collect research data such as sound recordings from field trips,artworks produced by members of an arts faculty, or data from an electron microscope.Another area where repositories stretch the boundaries of libraries is in disseminatinginformation and assisting with research.  It is a shift from disseminating to publishing andassisting to collaborating.There are many well-tested ways that have been developed over many years to tell peoplewhat is in the library, from adding information to the catalogue to information literacyclasses.  However, as noted earlier, the basis of dissemination of material in a repository is tomake it available openly.  That may be providing an interface to let people search and see thefull material or it could be letting other people and institutions include links to the material inthe repository in their service, or to harvest material.  The material is often not publishedelsewhere and this, combined with a promotional role to make the material available, makesit more like publishing than the dissemination role normally played by libraries.Providing assistance to researchers is also a feature of library services, whether that isproviding a reference and research service, or copying facilities or tutorial “reading bricks”.Repositories stretch this range of tasks into helping researchers choose appropriate ways tocreate digital material, assisting them to describe and load material to a repository, andworking with them to provide access in meaningful ways.  This is a more collaborativeapproach to research output than has previously been experienced, much more than justproviding assistance.To preserve and sustainKeeping digital material safe and secure is a straightforward though not necessarily trivialtask.  The difficulty is continuing to make it viewable.  An analogy is the U-matic video. Youmay have a perfectly fine tape but no videoplayer to view it on.  It is not just preserving thetape that is important.  You need the equipment to view it.  The software and hardware usedto view digital material becomes obsolescent rapidly and constantly.  Keeping digitalmaterial means not just making sure bitstreams are all still there but also ensuring that peoplecan still view the material.  This is made more complex because of the great number offormats that digital material comes in.  Many are proprietary and most that are incompatiblewith each other.  This can range from simple still images in a TIFF format, through complexinteractive e-books written for a particular type of hand-held reader, to astounding newsound/music/visual art explorations that combine user-driven sound, text and moving imagewith software written just for that work.At this stage in the life of repositories there are more questions than answers.  Some of thequestions that repositories are grappling with include: Are we trying to preserve the full experience or the intellectual content only?  Forexample, does it matter if the look-and-feel of a learned research article changes frombrowser to browser or over time if all the words are there?  Should images and linksfrom icons to sound recordings in the article appear on the screen at exactly the sameplace every time?  Is it absolutely necessary for the moving image in the article to be inAVI format rather than MPEG21? There are questions about what we want to preserve.  A course lecture and its notesmay have a more ephemeral life than sound recordings of a significant singer.3Deciding how much effort to put into preserving different types of research material isa critical choice. For repositories, the material begins with the researcher.  Choosing the format is adecision often made by the researcher.  Capturing and creating technical,administrative and descriptive metadata can be tasks undertaken by the researcher.  Bythe time the material arrives at the repository, it is often too late for the “owner” of therepository to control or find this information, even if they want to do this work.Current thinking is that the more that is known about a digital object, the easier it willbe to decide how to preserve it.  How do we preserve material in the absence or paucityof information?  As an aside here, I would like to mention the value for repositories ofall the descriptive metadata that libraries have been creating with catalogue records ofsuch things scores, sound recordings and theses.  The re-use of this information inrepositories is of great benefit and explains why librarians have been influential indescriptive metadata standards for repositories. Much discussion has also occurred around whether it is better to migrate to newformats or develop ways to view old formats.  Within these are permutations.  Justconsidering migration, you could migrate everything to standard formats as you addthem to the repository with the idea you can continue to migrate from standard formatto standard format more easily.  Alternatively, you could wait until someone wants toview them and migrate the old format as it is needed. Finally, there is the need for economic sustainability of the repository itself.Regardless of what hardware or software is used to operate the repository, theinstitution needs to commit to keeping digital material for the long haul.  This is notsubstantially different from the commitment libraries have to maintaining paper-basedmaterial.  A key difference at this point in the life of repositories is that the costs arenot clear.Why be brave?Notwithstanding the unknowns, difficulties and questions raised in this paper, there isnothing like testing the waters to find out what you do and do not know, and what is easy andwhat is hard.  The impetus for repositories comes from research needs.  The absence of a repository willnot stop researchers creating, communicating, and publishing in digital formats.  What willbe lost is the research output.The technology to support repositories already exists in open source and commercial forms.Though nascent, the technology is developing rapidly and is being used by a wide range ofinstitutions.Theoretical models, standards and protocols5 have been posited and developed forrepositories.  But it is only with implementation that flaws become obvious, simplificationsare discovered and best practice is determined.This is not the brave new world that Miranda in Shakespeare’s Tempest was thinking of whenshe said “O! Brave new world, that hath such people in’t”, nor the shocking world created byAldous Huxley, but one developed by a partnership between repositories and researchers5 See, for example, the Open Archival Open Information Reference Model:http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/wwwclassic/documents/pdf/CCSDS-650.0-B-1.pdf4with small, cautious steps towards a way to keep and provide access to digital researchmaterial.A final wordI couldn’t let this opportunity go by without having a small plug for the project I am workingon!  The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories aims to become a centre ofexcellence for the management of scholarly assets in digital format, particularly in the areasof access continuity and the sustainability of digital collections.  APSR is supported by theCommonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability program6 through the Departmentof Education, Science and Training7.  The APSR partners will develop and test ideas withreal-life data and issues over three years.  The partners are the Australian NationalUniversity, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, the National Library ofAustralia and the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing.It is early days in the three-year program but I hope you will be interested to know that a keyoutcome is to share expertise, knowledge and skills not just amongst the partners but withother repository owners in Australia and overseas.APSR’s website is http://www.apsr.edu.au and I would be very happy for you to visit the siteor ask questions of me.Thank you for your time.6 http://backingaus.innovation.gov.au/7 http://dest.gov.au/5

The brave new world of libraries and repositories

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