As an economist I can assure you that the market will sort these things out. Unfortunately, I have no idea how long that will take and I’d guess there are very few others who can give a sharper forecast.

Your thoughtful piece points up a severe problem I have as a repository manager. I am one librarian. ONE. I serve twenty-six campuses with hundreds of faculty each. With the best will in the world, I CANNOT make the individual connections Dr. Arvan wants with every single faculty member I am supposed to serve.

Yet most of my librarian colleagues have no idea what I do, no idea that I need their help to do it, and worse, no interest in being the connection between me and the many Dr. Arvans I could help. In a word — I’m stuck. I don’t know how to get unstuck.

Certainly we have a critical social role to play in preservation and certainly the function of our libraries as public and academic spaces is an important issue that requires considerable discussion and thought — but it is our role as librarians, engaged in helping scholars with the process of discovery and learning that should be our first and foremost priority. To do that, we need to be getting out of the library (not just virtually, but physically) and engaged with faculty in the places where they are doing their work.

As I recall, another finding of the U of Rochester study was that faculty were interested in tools to support creating their work—for example, sharing and tracking versions as they write, particularly when they work collaboratively. Research from UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Higher Education on scholarly communication values among faculty and administration found that what mattered most is peer review. Together with Lanny’s emphasis on discovery, these appear to be the basic elements of scholarly communication from the faculty perspective: creating, improving, evaluating, validating, and sharing their work. And to do all this they also need access to other scholarly work.

Many librarians have a quite different array of issues packed into the term. In our parlance, scholarly communication is associated with the high price of serials, the fear that we will no longer be able to provide the collections our users need, the recognition that when we license digital content we don’t own it, and the wish that faculty would manage their intellectual property in such a way that we didn’t have to buy it back from commercial publishers at exorbitant rates. For libraries, scholarly communication is mainly about copyright, access, and preservation.

The main overlap between these perspectives is access, but even there we should distinguish between faculty and library concerns. Scholars want access, quickly and efficiently, whereas we worry about continuing to provide it. In periodic moments of crisis (facing large serial cancellations) we come together around this. But let’s acknowledge that, particularly at larger research institutions with good collections of online journals, most faculty can find and share research more easily now than ever before.

My point? Institutional repositories, especially to the extent that they focus on collecting copies of published articles, appear to address librarians’ concerns about scholarly communication, but do not work so well for scholars’ meanings of that term.

IRs are not a method for helping scholars create, improve, and evaluate their work in a way that helps them get tenure or promotion. That is what publishers do—well and poorly, via open access, to break even, or for profit. So I understand why faculty may be perplexed at our “bizarre fascination” with repositories as a digital publishing/scholarly communications solution.

In short, IRs may be a solution to a set of problems that our faculty do not find pressing. If librarians want to collaborate with scholars in creating new, sustainable forms of scholarly communication, we need to take their meanings of that term into account. Solutions that arise from a shared understanding are more likely to find traction with faculty, I suspect, than IRs have so far done.

But I agree that with IRs many libraries put the cart before the horse with a “build it and they will come” vision. Having recently attended the ARL SC Institute, it’s pretty clear that first you need to work with faculty to create awareness about scholarly communication issues, and develop a foundation that faculty can buy into with respect to why it’s of value to them, the institution and their discipline to deposit their scholarly writings into repositories. Then, with faculty supporting the concept, they are likely to be more open to supporting the building of the repository.

I also recall research by the librarians at the U of Rochester that supports your observations. Well known for their anthropological research methods, their work with faculty brought to light that the number one concern of faculty was discoverability – not preservation. Though preservation is important – we cannot overlook the WIIFM factor. If we do, we’ll probably fail. But you can’t ascertain what the WIIFM factor if you don’t first involve the faculty as partners in the process.

Maybe our discussions about the purpose of such efforts should consider adapting Ranganathan’s laws.

-Scholarship is for use.

-Every researcher, the sources he or she needs.

-Every source, the audience that might be interested.

-Save the time of the scholar.

-Scholarship is a growing organism.

While preservation may be an important issue (though, given the shelf-life of much scholarship, I sometimes wonder), this post has clarified my sense that in many ways we’re putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

Of course, given the expertise in discoverability that we demonstrate in our OPACs, maybe the dirty secret is that we are better at searching than we are making things findable.

Before I retire to my bomb shelter, let me reiterate I’m no expert on depositories and will be happy to be proven wrong.