Questions for the Australian (library) Repository Community

2013-10-27

I am at the CAUL Repository Community Days meeting, and along with a few other Antipodeans will he giving an update on the Open Repositories 2013 conference. I gave a report in a previous post, but I thought I'd do another summary with the benefit of a couple more months of hindsight, and ask a couple of questions of the Australian Repo community. Comments are open!

Reproducibility, reuse and friends

As Rick Jelliffe commented on my post we need to get stuff happening, rather than making excuses.

For controversial research, I think we have passed the point where "Use, Reuse, Reproduce is worthy, but I think maybe we're not there yet" is politically viable, however true it may be.

So what are we (the library community) going to do to help?

What's our 'Developer Challenge'?

The developer challenge event needs looking after. In the years that we could rely on JISC to show up to Open Repositories with facilitators like David 'Flanders' Flanders or Mahendra Mahey and journalists to document stuff things went pretty well, but this year JISC were not in a position to put in so many resources, many developers developers apparently didn't make the trip and things were a little more low-key. So, the conference committee has decided to get serious about, there is now officially a "Developer Track" with a "Developer Track Chair". Guess who that is.

And where where the Aussie and Kiwi developers? In 2008 in Southampton there were enough of us to make four-persong developer challenge entry with some left over, this year I had to beg the only other developer from our part of the world, Andrea Schweer (NZ) to enter the dev competition, which she did, and managed to produce something useful for the community.

But never mind Canada, where are the developers back home? In many cases they are no longer in the library, helping with the repository. And there is no more CAIRSS repository support service and no more CAIRSS technical officer. So how is the library, as custodian of the Publication Repository and (maybe) the Data Repository for the institute going to do what needs to be done as we reinvent the scholarly process?

Is our "Developer Challenge" getting access to developers in the first place?

Questions for the Australian (library) Repository Community by Peter Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.