Let's Get it Started!

Abstract

Most academic librarians have reached the conclusion that institutional repositories (IR) are a good idea. SPARC has hosted national meetings and workshops on the subject, as well as hosting the SPARC Institutional Repositories Discussion List (SPARC-IR). On the academic side of the house, Stevan Harnad is into the second decade of his jeremiad on the subject of self-archiving. A number of platforms have been created to support institutional repositories, including Dienst, e-prints.org, D-Space, the Open Knowledge Project, and FEDORA, in addition to commercial hosting services from BE Press, BioMed Central and ProQuest. If librarians and academicians agree on the desirability of institutional repositories, and software platforms and services are available to make repositories technically feasible, one is left to ponder a few questions. Why are there so few institutional repositories up and running? Why are the existing institutional repositories generally not well filled with the intellectual output of their respective institutions? The difficulties involved in establishing an IR are not economic or technological in nature. Rather, they are sociological and strategic, with organizational inertia being a large obstacle to this early phase of implementation. Here are a few suggestions for focusing initial efforts to get an IR off the ground.