The Quantum Archivist

The 2010 edition of the IMLS WebWise conference kicks off tomorrow in Denver with two pre-conferences. I’ve been the steward for the half-day workshop called “Digital Repositories Uncovered” run by Sarah Shreeves, Coordinator of IDEALS at UIUC, and Jessica Colati, Director of the Alliance Digital Repository here in Colorado (and yes, we are related). As I mentioned in a previous post, Sarah and Jessica have what I think is a difficult job of selling people something they need but don’t think they want. But that is only one part of the story. Managing digital repositories means more than just convincing content owners that they want to deposit. It involves understanding copyright and fair use, intellectual property law, hardware and server specifications, software applications, and how to talk to programmers. If digital repository managers were soccer players, they would be center midfielders, able to direct the flow of the game, and understand and coordinate how all the parts work.

The half-day workshop covers a range of issues repository managers have to face (I’ve seen the previews) but most importantly, I think the workshop helps repository mangers think about who they are, and their central role in the collection, management, preservation and use of digital content.

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.