Weekly readings - 20 October 2006

Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications. Tyler O. Walters. D-Lib Magazine.

October 2006.

The number of institutional repositories is increasing and increasingly they are more important for storing and sharing scholarly information. But they are becoming more than just a place to store, organize, and access content. Users now expect content that can be used in other settings and environments, reused in multiple formats, and also forums to exchanging ideas, both on and off campus. Everyone has ‘content’, not just libraries. To support these needs, content managers must be able to send/receive, store, organize, and archive content. The content must be easy to find and to use with other systems. In approaching this, libraries should follow this guiding principle: “first determine university goals and faculty needs and then develop products, services, and capabilities with these in mind.” If the repository is an indispensable part of the educational activities of the campus, it will get the support needed to survive. The success may well depend on finding creative ways for faculty and students to use the information in the repository, and a number of services and processes are mentioned. More work is need to integrate the repository into the institution.

8.6 gigapixel stitched photograph of Italian fresco revealed. Rob Galbraith. Web site. October 19, 2006.

Worth looking at: An Italian group that specializes in art restoration, preservation and high-resolution art photography, has posted an 8.6 gigapixel stitched image of an Italian fresco. The image consists of 1145 frames that were assembled into the final image of 96,679 pixels x 89,000 pixels. The methods used to assemble and crop the final image are a closely-guarded secret, since the company had to create custom tools and techniques to produce a high-resolution picture such as this.

It required writing dedicated software for some tasks because this large of an image can't be generated with a 'shoot and stitch' approach.

Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository. Heleen Gierveld. Ariadne. October 2006.

Institutional Repositories come from the an institution’s vision to collect, secure, and provide digital access to scholarly publications in a local way. These repositories have emerged mostly because several reasons, of technological innovations which allow a new way to collect a university's output, reacting to the high cost of serial publications, and a way to provide quick access to publications. While the benefits may be clear to librarians, it is unclear if they are attractive to authors. The repositories have difficulty attracting content, which is a critical factor for the success of the repository. There are several approaches and factors presented, but essentially the institutional repository is a Product, and developing and managing it is a marketing matter. It requires good communications and a good strategy, but it must also meet a need and exceed the expectations of the users.