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It’s a poor SWORD that doesn’t point both waysToday

This is interesting, and also enormously cool. The granddaddy disciplinary repository of them all, arXiv, can accept SWORD deposits! Thanks, arXiv!

I entirely agree with all of Dr. Ginsparg’s comments as stated, so I won’t restate them. I do note that my characterization of Dr. Harnad’s single-deposit vision as impractical holds up nicely; arXiv is prepared to accept deposits from IRs, but it is not prepared to send IRs its own deposits. Ginsparg’s comments don’t look to me to offer much hope of that happening, either.

I offer, through my usual Achaea University personae, some scenarios that might present a “natural functional advantage” to the IR-plus-SWORD-plus-disciplinary-archive route:

• Achaea University adopts a Harvard-style open-access mandate. If she wants her articles in arXiv as well, Dr. Troia must rather annoyingly dual-deposit… unless Achaea’s IR implements a deposit pipeline to arXiv, in which case the most she has to do is tick a ticky-box (and I can imagine ways to abstract away the ticky-box).
• NSF open-access mandates become a reality, and Dr. Troia has to send her work to a PubMedCentral analogue. Again, if she also wants it in arXiv, she has to dual-deposit, unless her IR gives her a h

This handbasketToday

I find myself wondering why libraries opened institutional repositories.

Wait, I should qualify that. I know why European and Australian libraries opened them. I’m confused about the States.

There are isolated cases of a request coming from academic administration, but my understanding is that for the most part, libraries took up the idea on their own. Opening an IR can’t be done on the grassroots level, so somebody convinced a lot of top library administrators that this was a good idea.

Who? How? And what did the library admins think they were going to get out of the deal?

I wasn’t there in the early days; I was just entering library school when Cliff Lynch wrote the infamous “essential infrastructure” piece. I don’t know these things. As much as I hate asking for more goofy library research, this is a research question I’d like to see answered. The results have implications for how IRs get out of the mess that they’re in.

Ada Lovelace DayYesterday

I think writing about our tech mentors is a glorious idea and I’ve signed up to do it. Won’t you join me?

A clarification on SWORDJanuary 5

Stevan Harnad, in the course of a useful blog post about the practices of faculty, notes that faculty who prefer disciplinary repositories generally refuse to double-deposit in IRs, and suggests the following:

The solution for this relatively small population of seasoned self-archivers is for their institution-external deposits to be automatically imported back into their IRs using the SWORD protocol (which can also be used to export automatically from IRs to central repositories). There is no need for veteran self-archivers to change their practices or to double-deposit.

It’s a nice vision, and it’s technically feasible, but it doesn’t quite work the way Dr. Harnad would like, at least not via SWORD. Let me explain.

SWORD is not a harvesting protocol; it is a deposit protocol. The party that initiates a SWORD deposit is the party with the material in hand. SWORD offers no way for a repository that wants material from another repository to request it, much less do so in an “automatic” fashion.

For the SWORD-based dual-deposit system Dr. Harnad describes to work, the disciplinary repository would have to arrange for SWORD deposit into every single IR represented by the faculty who deposit there. It would also have to track faculty affiliations, to send d

Name authority control in IRsJanuary 2

There’s now a postprint up of my forthcoming Cataloging and Classification Quarterly article entitled “Name authority control in institutional repositories.” My sincere thanks to publisher Taylor and Francis for allowing use of the SPARC Author Addendum.

I have had reason to circulate this article at MPOW in advance of its publication. Popping it into the IR made my life just that little bit easier, which I appreciate. Again, kudos to Taylor and Francis.