Re: One library or many?

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

hi Chris,

Cost gains aren't everything, although the costs of multiple copies
nowadays is negligible, and shrinking.  Once something is digitized, it's
really not hard at all to create many, many copies - just ask the music
industr!  It will become even easier over time to copy whole collections.

The benefits have more to do with security than costs.  One aspect of
security that is needed is ensuring that the information is preserved;  
this is part of of the LOCKSS (lots of copies keep stuff safe)  
philosophy.

Google is a really neat search engine, for example - but it's also a new
way of doing business that is not tested.  The waybackmachine is terrific
too; however, what if the person(s) behind this decide to quit, or reach a
point where this is less useful than it is today?

If material is open access today, then if free access is shut down in the
future, one is secure with information up to that date with local hosting
- without, one might have nothing.

Much as I'd love to think world peace is imminent, the reality is that it
is not uncommon for one part of the world to not get along with another.  
If you're relying for much of your information on a remote server in a
country that suddenly decides it doesn't like your country any more, you
could be out of luck.  If a lot of the information you rely on is in that
country, you could be quite seriously out of luck.

Institutional repositories will be needed for much more than storage of OA
peer-reviewed journals.  It is unlikely that anyone besides one's own
university is likely to consider it important to store and preserve much
of the output of one's own university, such as student papers and faculty
powerpoints.  This is one of the many potential functions of an
institutional repository.  Another reason IRs are inevitable, is simply
because organizations have a legal obligation to maintain records.  As
more records become electronic-only, mechanisms for their storage will be
necessary.

At first, it might not seem obvious that the library is the logical place
for the institutional repository.  Given the functions of the IR, careful
analysis will show that the library is the best place.  One of the
functions of the IR is to store information, which needs to be organized
so that one can find it (in more than one way - might be nice to an item
to come up on a google search, but the IR will need to answer such
questions as what has been published by a particular department, where is
that individual student or faculty powerpoint - even the ones that might
rank past the 10,000 mark in google).  People will need help finding
information housed in IRs, whether at their own or other universities.  
The dramatic rise in information which I expect to continue - with or
without OA, but even more dramatic with OA - will make information
literacy skills even more necessary.  The skills sets needed by IR staff?  
How to store information, organize it, help people find it and/or teach
people how to find what they need on their own, to name a few.  This is
librarianship.  We can utilize existing staff, and the profession as it
is, or we can re-create the library and the profession.  Using what we
already have is more cost-effecitve.

hope this helps,

Heather Morrison

On 15-Sep-04, at 6:14 PM, Chris Beckett wrote:

> Whether individual institutions need individual libraries is a separate
> question - my personal view is that they do.
>
> I think what Joe was suggesting is that the Heather had not quite made
> the case for local storage of all resources at all institutions.
>
> This would seem counter-intuitive given the general trend of libraries
> accessing the electronic copy remotely and in many instances also
> cancelling the print copy previously held locally.
>
> Perhaps Heather would like to expand on the cost gains to be had from
> local hosting?
>
> Chris Beckett