CUNY Academic Works - Librarian Toolkit

The aim of the toolkit is to provide repository managers with best practices and educational resources to support interoperability, discoverability and the development of value added services. The toolkit provides access to resources related to the role of repositories, discovery and interoperability, next generation repositories, and contains links to technical information for implementing and managing repository platforms.

Since Clifford Lynch’s infamous call to arms (2003), academic libraries have been wasting their time trying to change the scholarly communication system on the feeblest of rationalizations. Proper librarians know that the current system is obviously the most sustainable, since it’s lasted this long and provided so much benefit to libraries (Rogers, 2012a) and profit to organizations as diverse as Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, and the American Chemical Society, as well as their CEOs (Berrett, 2012). Moreover, faculty have proclaimed loudly and clearly that they believe libraries’ central role is to be the campus’s collective knowledge wallet (Schonfeld & Housewright, 2010; Lucky, 2012), so who are librarians to argue?

Library-run 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 have been wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management. These problems are not insoluble, especially in light of Harvard University arts and science faculty's recent permissions mandate, but they demand serious reconsideration of repository missions, goals, and means if we are to be ready for Harvard imitators, and especially to be ready should those imitators not surface.