The Quantum Archivist

And then they want it YESTERDAY.

There have been numerous studies related to why or why not Institutional Repositories succeed. Many of them have been gathered by Chris Bailey in his Institutional Repository Bibliography.

Basically, IRs fail because no one has any use for them (in the economic sense of “utility”) and because they are often marketed as preservation solutions and not as something that could benefit the actual users. I had a conversation the other day with some folks who want me to market our digital repository to faculty, get significant buy-in, and then explore how we can expand services for them. Sort of the opposite of “if you build it they will come.”  Now that the age of experimentation in digital libraries is over, and has been for about 5 years, the idea of leading from the front has taken a back seat to leading from behind.  The tagline we hear most often is “user-centered design.”  That is, our systems must reflect what users want and not necessarily what we think they need. Presumably, the user knows what he wants, and it is up to us to give it to him.

I think there is a flaw in this approach. Most users can only imagine what they want within the context of what they already know.  This idea is illustrated in numerous folktales. One of my favorites is “Jaimie O’Rourke and the Big Potato” where Jaimie, after being granted a wish by a leprechaun, wishes, not for a release from poverty or anything like that, but for the biggest potato in the world because that’s the best thing he can think of. While Jaimie ends up all right, he would have done much better if he could have broken free from established conventions.

But how could we have expected him to? Can we really expect users to be able to articulate or even imagine paradigm changing scenarios without being led to them in some way by people who think about this all the time?

I think we should go back to leading from the front, by listening to our users and (at the risk of sounding like Mama Odie here), discerning from them what it is they need, rather than what they want.

Most people don’t know that they need a digital repository, or if you ask them, think that they don’t need one at all (I have backups! I have network drives! I have CDs!). But if you give them something they need, like a platform for open access publishing or a means to deliver content that they couldn’t include in their most recent publication, or a place to keep their grant-funded datasets, THEN they see a value in what you are offering not because it offers permanent durability, but because it meets a need or solves a problem, or just makes their life easier.

Despite what we as archivists know to be the value of digital repositories, for the user, the digital repository is a means, and not a destination in itself. For them it is a means of access to a corpus of content that they need to do their scholarly work that will be there when they need it. For us, it is the other side of the same coin.