mar09b.indd


scholarly communication 
Allyson Mower and Lisa Chaufty 

Do something no one has 
imagined 
The 2008 SPARC Digital Repositories meeting 

John Wilbanks (director of Science Com­mons) opened the SPARC Digital Reposi­
tories meeting1 with a message that greatly 
resonated with those attending: do something 
no has imagined, and don’t wait. Indeed, 
many of the 330 repository managers, librar­
ians, publishers, vendors, and technology 
specialists from around the world who con­
vened in Baltimore to share success stories 
and failures regarding digital repositories, 
have already done so and plan to continue 
the trajectory. 

According to Heather Joseph (executive 
director of SPARC), digital repositories have 
“moved out of infancy into a long and healthy 
life cycle,” and the many panelists and speak­
ers at the conference demonstrated this. The 
two main themes of the conference were that 
data needs to be inter­operable, connected, 
and shared; and that the success of reposi­
tories is connected to the services they can 
provide to faculty. 

The initial panel focused on new hori­
zons, but first provided a review of the cur­
rent position of repositories. Norbert Lossau 
(director of Goettingen State and University 
Library) summarized that while many re­
positories exist (the count has now grown to 
approximately 1,200), the deposits to them 
remain low. Sayeed Choudhury (associate 
dean for library digital programs, Johns 
Hopkins University) indicated that despite 
this, institutional repositories (one kind of 
digital repository) act as a beginning and 
not an end to the process of ensuring open 
access to scholarly digital content. Shawn 
Martin (scholarly communication librarian 
at University of Pennsylvania) and Jennifer 

Campbell­Meier (doctoral student, University 
of Hawaii) continued by noting that chang­
ing the mission statement of an institutional 
repository to come more in line with content 
creators and their needs can, perhaps, lead 
to higher deposit levels. For many faculty 
members, according to Martin, the issue of 
open access is not as important as raising their 
profile in the online environment. 

This theme continued in the next session, 
where presenters discussed the importance 
of repositories providing value­added user 
services to members of the academic com­
munity rather than focusing on a message 
of open access versus closed access. Joan 
Giesecke (dean of libraries) and Paul Royster 
(coordinator of scholarly communications) 
both of University of Nebraska­Lincoln, 
shared their strategies for increasing the 
number of participating authors. Services in­
clude research reporting, promoting a work, 
obtaining copyright permissions, scanning, 
and typesetting. 

Hideki Uchijima (librarian, Kanazawa 
University Library in Japan) offers an up­
load­just­in­time service and uses two key 
tools: the Repository Output Assessment Tool 
(ROAT) to standardize statistics and AIRway 
to resolve links in commercial databases. 

Contact Joyce L. Ogburn—series editor, cochair of 
the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee, 
and university librarian at the University of Utah— 
with article ideas, e-mail: joyce.ogburn@utah.edu 

Allyson Mower is scholarly communication and 
copyright librarian, e-mail: allyson.mower@utah.edu, 
and Lisa Chaufty is institutional repository coordinator, 
e-mail: lisa.chaufty@utah.edu, at the University of 
Utah 

158C&RL News March 2009

mailto:lisa.chaufty@utah.edu
mailto:allyson.mower@utah.edu
mailto:joyce.ogburn@utah.edu


Lossau (mentioned above) leads the Digital 
Repository Infrastructure Vision for European 
Research (DRIVER) program, which provides 
trusted infrastructure to facilitate a network 
of repositories. 

A new feature of this year’s conference 
came in the form of the Innovation Fair. 
Twenty presenters had two minutes each 
to discuss their programs, projects, or ideas 
about repositories and their services. High­
lights included Citeline (developed by MIT), 
KWICpics (Keyword in Context Pictures, 
developed by the California Digital Library), 
and RUcore’s Faculty Portal (a custom inter­
face for faculty at Rutgers University). These 
three were particularly exciting because they 
offered personalized services for authors as 
well as custom viewing options for users. 
Repository managers could potentially use 
them to augment their existing services and 
increase author participation. 

Day two of the conference commenced 
with a public policy discussion, giving con­
ference attendees a view of world trends 
and perspectives from Europe, Japan, and 
the United States. David Prosser (director of 
SPARC Europe) asserted that the open access 
policy argument has been won by the open 
access movement through the impetus of ini­
tiatives like the European Union’s (EU) Lisbon 
Agenda, which strives to make the EU the 

“most competitive and dynamic knowledge­
driven economy by 2010.” Prosser expects 
that we are fast approaching a time when “it 
will be unusual for any leading institution or 
funder not to have an [open access] mandate.” 
The mandates currently in place will result in 
a significant number of papers being made 
openly accessible over the next few years. 
Syun Tutiya (professor of cognitive and in­
formation sciences, Chiba University) talked 
about the Japanese policy environment and 
compared the current environment to that 
of 2004, when SPARC last held its repository 
conference. 

While no policies are in place, the number 
of repositories in Japan has risen since 2004 
from four to the current 80. Bonnie Klein 
(copyright specialist, Defense Technology 
Information Center) gave an overview of 
some U.S. federal government repositories 
and pointed out the value each agency places 
in collaborating for the purpose of providing 
public access to government documents. 
Such repositories include science.gov, which 
contains content from 13 federal science 
agencies, and WorldWideScience.org. 

Presentations shifted from public policy to 
campus publishing strategies. Rea Devakos 
(coordinator, scholarly communication initia­
tives, University of Toronto) reviewed the 
Canadian publishing project Synergies, which 

Free ACRL scholarly communication resources 

Looking to spread the word about schol­
arly communication issues? The recently 
updated ACRL Scholarly Communication 
Toolkit provides context and background by 
summarizing key issues to offer quick, basic 
information on scholarly communication 
topics. It also links to examples of specifi c 
tools, including handouts, presentations, and 
videos for libraries to adapt and use on their 
own campuses.The updated toolkit serves 
as a resource for scholarly communication 
discussions inside the library, outreach 
programs to faculty and administrators, 
and library school students seeking to 
incorporate these issues into their course 

work. Libraries can also contribute to the 
toolkit by linking to tools and case studies 
on their local scholarly communication 
campaigns. The ACRL Scholarly Communi­
cation Toolkit is available at www.acrl.ala. 
org/scholcomm/. 

The new Association of Research Li­
braries/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Com­
munication guide “Developing a Scholarly 
Communication Program in Your Library” 
provides additional background information 
and outlines steps for libraries interested in 
developing scholarly communication pro­
grams.The guide is available online at www. 
arl.org/sc/institute/fair/scprog. 

March 2009  159 C&RL News 

www.acrl.ala
http:WorldWideScience.org
http:science.gov


is a research and dissemination tool that will 
use the Public Knowledge Project to make 
social science and humanities research digital. 
Devakos also highlighted Ontario’s Schol­
ars Portal, which is licensed to 20 Ontario 
universities and is a regional node of the 
Synergies project. Devakos relayed that such 
projects help information to be, in Caroline 
Haythornethwaite’s words, “attached, found, 
alive and [able to] evolve.” 

Catherine Mitchell (director, eScholar­
ship Publishing Group, California Digital 
Library) suggested provocatively that con­
versations about “the repository” in and 
of itself should stop and be reframed to 
focus on publishing services. She argued 
that institutional repositories stand as by­
products of services rendered rather than 
ends in themselves. 

An example of operating a repository on 
a small, liberal arts college campus came 
from Macalester College. Janet Sietmann 
(manager, DigitalCommons Project) and 
Teresa Fishel (library director) showcased 
the student research and publications avail­
able in their institutional repository. Both 
advised against “death by planning,” urging 
strongly that all library staff should promote 
the repository, and suggested starting with 
a specific project that meets the needs of a 
specifi c audience. 

Final sessions centered on marketing 
strategies. Bob Witeck (CEO, Witeck­Combs 
Communications) offered four questions or 
strategies repository managers should con­
sider in order to successfully market their 
repositories: Who cares? Why does it matter? 
Who will fund/support and build trust? 

These discussions continued with the 
conference’s first­ever marketing practicum 
led by Nicole Colovos (vice president, Brem­
mer & Goris Communications). Colovos 
emphasized the importance of developing 
a consistent message by means of a position 
statement. Creating such a statement identi­
fies an audience, their needs, and how the 
repository can help them. She advised that 
the statement be crafted and tailored for 
faculty in individual disciplines. 

David Shulenberger (vice president for 
academic affairs, National Association of 
State Universities and Land­Grant Colleges) 
closed the session by recommending a prac­
tical approach to building and maintaining 
digital repositories. Shulenberger relayed a 
short synopsis of the history of publication 
and distribution and focused on “the gift” 
of scholarly knowledge. The role of digital 
repositories, in his view, is to assure that 
intellectual products paid for by donors 
and benefactors remain available for the 
public. Further, institutional repositories 
should showcase to citizens the research 
and scholarship happening on academic 
campuses and thereby enhances the value 
of the university in the eyes of the public. 
Shulenberger offered seven steps for library 
and information professionals to consider: 
have an institutional repository; work with 
administrators to build understanding; initi­
ate discussions about intellectual property 
policies; support efforts to spread public 
access policies, like the one put forward by 
the National Institutes of Health; educate 
campus units to support the best interests 
of their members; work with departments 
to produce deposit habits; and brand your 
institutional repository products as university 
material. 

As attendees, we came away from this 
conference with more ideas for enhanc­
ing our repository content and workfl ow. 
Moreover, we developed a new action plan 
for communicating our message: tailor our 
messages for all of the constituencies we 
work with (administration, faculty based on 
academic discipline, our IT department, and 
subject librarians); focus less on the open 
access argument and more on how our 
library’s scholarly communication program 
can best serve faculty needs; and, fi nally, 
market scholarly communication services 
more widely and aggressively. 

Note
1. The SPARC Digital Repositories meet­

ing was held November 17–19, 2008, in 
Baltimore. 

160C&RL News March 2009