The Southampton Bargate located in the midst of downtown shops, is part of the old town walls dating back to the Saxon era.

The Third Annual Open Repositories Conference (OR08) opened at the University of Southampton, UK, on April 1, 2008 with an observation by conference co-chair Les Carr. He suggested that the collective efforts of the 480+ delegates—repository managers, librarians, archivists, developers, project leaders and representatives from IT companies—who are working directly with worldwide research and information producers are creating a global web of knowledge.

Carr and his University of Southampton team have made all OR08 conference proceedings available in—what a surprise—a repository. You may browse and download presentations and posters here: http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/.

Peter Murray-Rust, a Reader in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College, gave the keynote address. He began his talk by asking how many of the assembled attendees worked in laboratories. A small number of hands went up. “We have a data drought,” He said. “Permission barriers caused 90% by people and only 10% by technology are preventing direct access to up-to-date scientific research findings.” Murray Rust suggested that the long tail of science, where most discovery takes place, has as its unit of allegiance membership in a small group working in laboratories.

“You can’t sit in a building with ivy growing up it and be removed from scientists in laboratories with their test tubes and small furry animals and call yourself a ’scientific repositorian,’” he said, ” Scientists don’t understand relational databases and hate metadata and keywords. They file everything on their desktops.”

He gave several examples of technologies and services that would help scientists in laboratories, and some that would not: “Scientists don’t want “notebooks.” Any deviation from common notation methods is too much work and they won’t use the tools.”
–RSS systems that email him “active molecules” harvested and updated by robots
–”Sticks” or incentives that compel scientists to contribute
–Text mining technologies that reclaim “lost” data from PDFs
–Involvment in scientific data collection workflow “upstream” closer to where data is created
–Pedabyte stores at universities so that there are facilities to hold scientific data at the source

NCore PI Dean Krafft after his presentation at OR08

Gardens in Southampton’s Central Park, and part of a mosaic found in the park.

Interoperability
Dean Krafft, NSDL NCore gave an overview of what was included in the NCore package of technologies and standards that allow for greater flexibility in collaborating and creating context around library resources. Krafft’s presentation was significant in scope and impact and provided attendees with multiple ideas for matching semantic content to this open source system that builds on the Fedora platform.

Sustainability
Sustainability affects what happens over time to virtually all aspects of the personnel and technology associated with ongoing repository operations possible. Stuart Haber began the Sustainability sessions at OR08 with a presentation entitled, “A Content Integrity Service for Digital Repositories.” He suggests that it is critical to be able to verify that a document, or piece of content is what it claims to be. His system creates a “witness” for each piece of a document—paragraph, sentence, speech, for example. The “witness” then computes a certificate of authenticity that is coupled and stored with the original document.
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Mary Marlino spoke frankly from personal experience about what to do when the email arrives informing you that your funding will not continue. She explained her planning for sustainability and asked that people think openly about what happens when and if a funding agency might “pull the plug.” She introduced fundamentals about DLESE, The Digital Library for Earth System Education—one of the first big digital library projects in the U.S. DLESE preceded NSDL by 18 months and was a grassroots, community-led project with 13,500 digital educational resources organized into 41 thematic collections in the completed collection. As an organization DLESE was a focal point for community action in geoscience education and developed numerous best practices towards building education-based digital libraries. Innovative teacher services such as online Strand Maps based on AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy were also developed for DLESE’s large and distributed community of K12 teachers.

NSF gave the DLESE team a one-year time frame, with one year of limited development support to ensure that users could continue to have access to DLESE resources for the not-clearly-defined “forseeable future.” They launched an analytical process to define core library components, come up with cost estimates, and criteria for selecting new business models. They wanted to continue library operations and selected a model that would extend end-user services and retain access for their user base of 1+ million users through the DLESE.org web site. Host selection involved making sure that users would still have free access, and that the institution they chose would have some financial stability.

The artifact was sustained in partnership with several groups—NSDL, DLS, UCAR, and NCAR, but the sense of community and ownership was lost. Marlino reiterated that she did not know what would happen with to the DLESE community and their embedded sense of ownership in their digital library.
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Les Carr presented, “End of Life Scenarios for the Repositories of Virtual Organizations.” In giving this talk he did not want to be known as the “man who burns repositories” as a result of this talk. His alternative title for the talk was “Or: who cleans up when the party ends?” Collecting and curating over time is what a persistent and permanent repository backed by policies and institutional commitment implies—it is not intended to be a fly-by-night dumping ground.

How old is old? How persistent is persistent? A review of venerable institutions like the University of Oxford, for example, shows that it was in existence in 1096, and may have been in existence even earlier. Seats of learning are by their nature institutions that can be counted on to last. Virtual libraries or repositories have only been around for the last decade or so, and often come into existence as a part of grant activities and without the benefit of clear institutional affiliation. Institutional repositories have long lifespans. Virtual repositories generally have shorter lifespans. Carr suggests that the “Squillions of Dollars” spent on international, highly collaborative multi-million dollar projects may equate to a longer repository lifespan. If the institution that backs the repository,however, disappears, contents are often tied up in administrative and resource allocation knots leaving information consumers without access.

Links and references
Presentations and posters from OR08
http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/
Flickr photos
http://flickr.com/search/?q=OR08&w=all