….A provacative idea that organizations involved in the Open Repostitories movement (and others) are working to address. Anyone who has ever bemoaned the state of their personal organization systems–I must clean out that file cabinet, or if I don’t get those photos organized and into an album they won’t make any sense to anyone, or that pile of disks was background for my book and now I can’t find anything on them–understands that the information trails humans leave along the way to some place else often contain nuggets that others might use if only they had access to “intellectual property left rotting.”

A quick inventory of the intellectual property, or “what’s inside of” almost any research university might uncover rich collections of historic objects, various types of media, books, and many different kinds of documents stored digitaly as well as on the shelves of libraries and other facilities. How should this institutional heritage be managed and made available? Or should it?

Clifford Lynch (Lynch C. A., “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.htm and others suggest that the most pressing reason for getting this collective knowledge into open repositories is to create new forms of digital spaces for scholarship. Scientists and scholars see an an additional opportunity to amplify and share research among consortia in a way that has not been possible in the past.

How does the content connection work? Do open repostitories intersect with new spaces for online scholarship like games and other forms of social media? Where are the cross points and what needs to happen to link increased access to all the world’s information to online spaces that could be incubators for new forms of understanding?

The Second Annual Open Repositories Conference will be held in San Antonio, Texas January 23-26 2007. Developers and potential developers will have an opportunity to find out how a global community of universities and organizations are leveraging repostiory architecture to make knowledge relevant, usable and accessible.