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.

In 2004, the NSF released the “Report of Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure” that outlined an ambitious program to provide for scientists and science scholars a network of support that went beyond mere bandwidth and computers that would encourage and enable discovery, collaboration, and progress in scientific inquiry.

Not to be outdone, two years later the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure produced, “Our Cultural Commonwealth,” the Humanists’s perspective on supporting scholarship in the digital age.

Since then there have been numerous initiatives relating to cyberinfrastructure in both Higher and K-12 Education, Science, and Humanities scholarship. Yet, to my knowledge nothing has been written concerning the impact or use of cyberinfrastructure on archives or the work that archivists do.

Cyberinfrastructure is “more than a tangible network and means of storage in digitized form, and it is not only discipline-specific software applications and project-specific data collections. It is also the more intangible layer of expertise and the best practices, standards, tools, collections and collaborative environments (italics added) that can be broadly shared across communities of inquiry.” (From “Our Cultural Commonwealth”)

At the heart of the cyberinfrastructure vision is the development of a cultural community that supports peer-to-peer collaboration and new modes of education based upon broad and open access to leadership computing; data and information resources; online instruments and observatories; and visualization and collaboration services. Cyberinfrastructure enables distributed knowledge communities that collaborate and communicate across disciplines, distances and cultures. These research and education communities extend beyond traditional brick-and-mortar facilities, becoming virtual organizations that transcend geographic and institutional boundaries. (from the NSF’s “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for the 21st Century” 2007)

In short, cyberinfrastructure is what underlies the modern academic world of collaborative, interdisciplinary research, teaching, and learning. It is the network of associated technology, middleware, and visualization tools and services that enables interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration and supports the development of innovative teaching and research.

Thinking of it this way, I think an important question we must ask ourselves is how can we integrate primary resources under our stewardship into the cyberinfrastructure of our institutions, our regions, and the world? Alternatively, how do we, as archivists, document and manage digital content that lives everywhere and nowhere at the same time?

Again, I’ll come back to a recurring theme, we need to make it possible to de-contextualize our collection objects so that they can be re-contextualized by scholars or anyone who has a use for them. This is not so different from traditional research, as the research function is all about creating new knowledge from primary resources (what “primary” may mean is another topic altogether). Secondly, we need to project those objects to the places where people are. In an academic setting, that means things like courseware tools or other places where students are encountering the building blocks of their work.