Cataloging and institutional repositories
While doing some reading for a little talk my colleague, Ed Summers, and I are giving at code4lib 2009, I came across a paragraph that sparked a crazy thought. So crazy that it's not crazy at all. So not crazy that I am sure other people have thought of it. But nonetheless, here I am writing about it just in case.
From Sarah Currier's paper on SWORD (emphasis mine):
One of the most frequently cited barriers to academics depositing their teaching materials into repositories is the keystroke-count involved in logging into a repository, uploading the resource, creating metadata, perhaps selecting a licence, and publishing the resource. It was a quick win, therefore, to create a drag-and-drop desktop tool to allow a single keystroke deposit of resources, including multiple resources in one action. For a repository that supports automatic metadata generation, administrative metadata can be created at the point of entry to the repository without the user needing to create any.
And I wondered how many repositories supported automatic metadata generation. I wondered how many repositories supported automatic generation of rich metadata. And lastly I wondered, might this be a more or less natural role for catalogers: augmenting stub metadata records or doing original cataloging for institutional repository deposits? Especially at a time when many of them are being reclassified as acquisitions specialists or digital projects managers?
Potential issues and questions:
- Author ignorance: Maybe catalogers are already doing this and I'm a moron?
- Scale: Is it realistic to expect to be able to "keep up" with repository deposits?
- Granularity: Does cataloging at the level of articles, and perhaps at even finer granularities, introduce challenges?
- Duplication: If pre-prints are cataloged in the IR, for instance, will they need to be cataloged again later?
- … there are others I thought of on my commute this morning but have since forgotten them. Feel free to add comments.
I will admit here that I've been somewhat out of the (academic) institutional repository space a while, and cataloging is something I don't share thoughts about very often because my exposure is limited to having taken one course a couple years ago.
I assume there's a body of research about this out there somewhere but I figured I'd post this anyway.
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It's happening a few places, but the word hasn't really got out yet, so no, you are not a moron. The more common model appears to be dedicated IR staff who may or may not be (and probably aren't) cataloguers or metadata specialists.
There should be action in this space over the next year or so (she said vaguely), as tools like BibApp and Islandora streamline the content-acquisition process.