Some suggestive observations about institutional repositories in the summary of a CNI roundtable discussion.
In many ways, discussing “institutional repositories” is misleading, in that the term is too limiting and focuses on a tool rather than the strategic imperative, which is planning for institution-wide digital asset management and developing both infrastructure components and a range of applications to support this. [Coalition for Networked Information]
This confirms what has emerged from the various discussions we have been holding. Really, a focus on a particular asset management system is only part of a wider issue about institutional stewardship and engaged support for new patterns of digital scholarship.
I was interested to read the following also given the recent discussions about identifiers:
We need a much better understanding of the high-level architectural issues involved in digital asset management – services, roles, components, and interrelationships. For example, it seems clear that there are a number of infrastructure components (i.e. identifier management, perhaps some abstractions of storage systems) that could serve a wide range of digital asset management applications, not just institutional repository systems, and we should be thinking about articulating and designing such services explicitly as infrastructure that will support this broader context. Other applications that might share infrastructure with institutional repositories include learning management systems, departmental or research-project-based repositories, or various kinds of records management or data management systems. [Coalition for Networked Information]
