Dorothea Salo at the University of Wisconsin is involved with the Institutional Repository – she is outspoken about librarianship and repositories so I hesitate to label her with either label. On her blog (Caveat Lector) she has created a fictional campus (University of Achaea, with Dr Helen Troia as leading character) who inter alia researches and teaches in Basketology – so maybe CavLec is best described as a basketologist). She occasionally comments on my blog and recently made a reference to “Roach Motel” – a common phrase on her blog. In the UK a roach is a fish but I know that in the US it’s a cockroach (inter alia), but I didn’t understand “Roach Motel”.
It turns out (thank you Wikipedia) that Roach Motel is a trap for cocroaches with the slogan
“Roaches check in — but they don’t check out!”
The analogy is that many things are checked into institutional repositories but few are checked out. She has formally expanded this view under the general theme that IRs aren’t working and put the preprint in her own (or rather HPOW’s in library-speak) IR:
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22088
Title: Innkeeper at the Roach Motel Authors: Salo, Dorothea Keywords: institutional repositories
open accessIssue Date: 11-Dec-2007 Citation: Salo, Dorothea. “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.” Library Trends 57:2 (Fall 2008). Abstract: Trapped by faculty apathy and library uncertainty, institutional repositories face a crossroads: adapt or die. The “build it and they will come” proposition has been decisively proven wrong. Citation advantages and preservation have not attracted faculty participants, though current-generation software and services offer faculty little else. Academic librarianship has not supported repositories or their managers. Most libraries consistently under-resource and understaff repositories, further worsening the participation gap. Software and services are wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management. These problems are not insoluble, but they demand serious reconsideration of repository missions, goals, and means. URI: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22088 Appears in Collections: General Library Collection
Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
PMR: I’ll comment on the cntent below but my immediate comment on the meta-data is that I have no indication of my rights to this information. It’s Openly visible and, I assume, permanently visible so it qualifies for OA1 (==weak OA, I think). So we can label it Open Access. But I don’t know whether she has transferred copyright to the publisher and – as I don’t read m/any journals in this area I don’t know whether the journal has any Open Access policy. The mantra about DSpace copyright shown typical librarian paranoia – if we don’t know what the copyright is, put on the strongest protection possible so we won’t get into trouble. So, if I were a basketologist, I would be frightened off using this article in a course on Open Access and Repositories. Dorothea is a DSpace expert so I imagine it took her within the Harnad-Carr six minute event horizon for deposition.
Dorothea is very clear that IRs aren’t working and libraries have a limited future unless they change. Read the article. I have to say I am in sympathy with this view. I’ve come to meet many librarians and repositarians over the last two years or so and I wish them well. In general they don’t impact on my colleagues research (I can’t comment on teaching). If librarians are to continue in a research environment they have to discover what researchers want and give it to them. Here are some suggestions:
- Please help me with the mechanical and arcane parts of putting my CV together.
- Please help me write the grant and give me a higher chance of success. How many institutions have any idea why their grants fail?
- I spend hours preparing papers for publication – please do the boring bits for me
- I’ve just got this collaboration with … – and we need an electronic collaborative environment
- I’ve just lost all my data.
- I’ve lost all my data again
- I don’t want to lose my data a third time
These are the sorts of things researcher want. Maybe IRs can help with some of them. But not yet as we know them.
(In fairness JISC has several projects addressing some of these. But they don’t yet scale).
Files in This Item:
File Description Size Format Handle RoachMotel.pdf 211Kb Adobe PDF http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22089 View/Open RoachMotel.doc 248Kb Microsoft Word http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22090 View/Open
I am both a librarian and a repository manager, and I’m not ashamed of either label. Rather proud of the former one, really.
One slight disagreement: Academic libraries have a future independent of scholarly communication, open access, and eScience. I think such a future would be a poor and narrow one, personally, but that’s different from suggesting no future at all. What I am still dubious about is the extent to which IRs have a future in academic libraries in the United States. I was quite serious about “change or die.” I see signs of change, but death is still quite possible.
The rights situation on that article is that I had to ask the editors for permission to post the preprint; they readily agreed. I don’t personally care what else anyone does with it, but Library Trends might. I’m as irked by the red tape and uncertainty as you are, I assure you.
I will push back, however, on copyright paranoia being specifically a library problem. Maybe it’s different on your side of the pond, but on this side, faculty are vastly more paranoid than most librarians I know. Ignorance is a huge part of the problem, but intentional dog-in-the-manger behavior is far from rare.
And yes, I ought to have reali(s|z)ed the “roach” problem. Oops. Ah, well.