The last session that I’m going to – but really relevant. Unfortunately I’ve missed the first 10 minutes or so. Someone (think it must be Peter Gorman from University of Wisconsin-Madison?) is speaking about their experience of having an institutional repository.

Just mentioned the SWORD API to help deposit workflow. Also mentioning bibapp, and using the SWORD API to push stuff from bibapp to the institutional repository. Also EM-Loader doing something similar.

So, what is the difference between Institutional Repository content and Digital Library content? Users doing (necessarily) care where stuff comes from, or how it gets there, and most the objects, although very varied, have the same fundamental management, preservation and access needs.

This has challenged the assumption underlying their IR infrastructure.

Now showing a ‘scary diagram’ – showing how one central ‘repository’ could take in content, and what services it would need to support.

Some interesting questions remain:

• What is a collection?
• Does the material determine it?
• Does our s/w determine it?
• Does our workflow determine it?
• What aggregations are meaningful to our users – and in what contexts?
• Single repository gives possibility of more flexible aggregations that serve specific contexts (I’d say I’m not sure this depends on the backend storage, but on the access systems, but I think the overall point is a good one)
• When do we select?
• What do we catalog? – and why?
• What’s the role of Archives? Overlap with traditional archives roles – in physical world, well established, need to establish them for the virtual world

No answers to these at the moment…

Moving to a different topic, Copyright:

We (librarians) may have mutliple roles:

• Deciding what to digitize
• Determining access rights
• Negotiating digitization/access rights
• Advising contributors on copyright and Fair Use
• Faculty submitters
• Students (Electronic Theses)
• And sharing knowledge with others
• Orphan works

Mentioning OCLC idea of joint work on this, creating a central database on this. Google have released copyright information they have collected this week on works. Hoping that the Google and OCLC efforts can be brought together.

Copyright determination: theses and dissertations

• Is it published? (according to Copyright law) – speaker thinks ‘yes’ but they are looking into it at the moment and getting legal advice
• What is the publication date?
• Is there a copyright notice?
• Does Fair Use apply?

Mentioning a resource from the Library of Congress ‘circular 22’ – how to investigate the copyright status of a work – noting the first half is scary and seems designed to put you off even starting the process – but skip that and go to the second half which is full of really good advice.

Also, there are flowcharts from places – e.g. from lawyers Bromberg and Sunstein which was used by speakers institution.