CRIG Future of Repositories (Article Series)

From DigiRepWiki

The Future of Repositories?

Repositories have evolved extremely quickly. Today, they can be found all over the place. Hundreds of 'repositorians' visit the annual OpenRepositories conference, and hundreds of workshops throughout the year focus on the myriad of issues involved with repository creation, management and advancement. Companies including Microsoft and Google are setting up their own repository efforts. Yet, uptake has been disappointing for many institutions and resulted in greater costs than originally intentioned.

The authors of this paper do not see "success" for repositories as a given. Repositories and their contexts need to change in organisation, communication, and technology - and they can. To achieve this, we...

  1. ...call for interoperability between repositories, to enable new organisational models of repositories - "patterns for (cross-)repository architectures"
  2. ...demand user be kept as the focus, and identify patterns of cross-repository collaboration - "Services"
  3. ...insist that organisations analyse the real value of repositories, to guide repository management - "Costs"

In a future repository environment we envision the scholar at the center of the repository world, with the repository intertwined with scholar evolving with the surrounding Academic environ (e.g. a research environment, the lab, a company intranet). Technologies facilitate new organisational and business models (outsourcing, collaboration, etc), and thereby foster collaboration across institutions/disciplines/repository systems.

Collaborative repository management may be just a click away.