Digital repository futures at Caltech

Abstract

Digital repository and asset management options are dizzying in number, providing a wide range of services to meet diverse institutional needs, audiences, and content. At Caltech the Library currently supports five different repository services, hosting published and other scholarly documents, research data, digitized archival collections, archived web sites, and born-digital archives. For institutional, professional, historical and aspirational reasons our information management and repository systems have little integration, and span the gamut of possible repository attributes: curated content and self-service; a variety of metadata schema; both locally hosted and cloud-based software; both open source and proprietary solutions. Sustaining such a disparate variety of systems into the future with limited resources is clearly not sustainable, and confusing for both users and managers alike, especially as the volume and variety of digital content in need of curation and access services expands. The Caltech Library’s Repository Futures Strategy Team is in the process of assessing the various needs we will have going forward, and is working on a plan that will provide repository services that are sustainable and flexible across a wide range of needs, and provide robust management and user services to depositors, curators, and the public. The presentation reports on the work of the team, including a longer term vision for Caltech Library's repository services, a suggested road map for future development, and a discussion of the challenges we face in realizing that vision.