Digital Repository Sustainability - frustrations, but no answers

Last week in one of the class blog entries someone mentioned academic librarian Dorothea Salo’s blog post about institutional repositories. This got me interested in what else Salo had to say, so I spent some time poking around in her blog. I found an earlier blog entry (written Aug. 6 and titled simply “Sustainability”) concerning, appropriately enough, the sustainability of repositories. Sustainability is something we've touched upon in class, though when we've mentioned sustainability, from what I can recall, we mostly talked about the sustainability of digital information in pretty general ways. It is a major point of concern in the digital world.

In this blog entry, Salo vents her frustrations about repositories that lack preparing for the future, mostly in terms of long term funding plans. One of the concerns she mentions is that arXiv is looking for a new funding model because Cornell University is tired of paying for the entire tab to host and operate the site. If Cornell no longer wants to pay to keep arXiv running, and no one else comes along to pitch in, what happens then?

The second frustration Salo talks about (which she expanded upon last week in another blog entry called “Object lesson: when researchers run repositories”) is trying to find a long-term disciplinary repository outside of her institution and running into more sustainability problems. In Salo’s search for an appropriate disciplinary repository she found two possibilities – one repository restricted by geography and the other... which made her angry. The second repository, which she discusses more in last week’s blog entry, was apparently cobbled together and then abandoned by a pair of researchers. She lists other examples of institutional and disciplinary repositories that have failed to plan for the future and wind up needing funding rescues to keep going. Sometimes the repositories get rescued, but sometimes they don’t, and when the latter happens, these repositories end up abandoned or shut down, and data ends up lost. Salo calls this lack of succession planning “flagrantly irresponsible.” The italics are hers, used for added emphasis to convey her mounting frustration.

The point she makes in both of these blog entries that our field’s “continuing error... is that we have no infrastructure or plan for accomplishing these rescues [of repositories].” This is one of many major concerns with digital repositories. Not only is there the problem that we keep mentioning in class with getting people to share their documents and data in repositories, there is also the concern of whether the repositories will continue to exist even in the short term, let alone for the future. How can we expect people to deposit their information in repositories if there is the risk that the repository will be shut down or abandoned due to poor planning? As more and more information becomes and is born digital, repositories will keep popping up online, and Salo predicts that more and more digital repository rescues will be needed in the future because of a failure to plan long-term. This prediction seems likely and highly frustrating.

One thing Salo fails to offer in her blog entries is any sort of real solution (which her critics point out somewhat harshly in the blog comments), but she does call for an open discussion of this issue in a “cross-institutional fora”. From what we keep reading in class, sustainability is a huge issue for all digital information, not just for digital repositories. But, though people keep writing about sustainability and talking about it, there doesn't yet seem to be many solutions for it. I suppose this is part of what is challenging, frustrating, and a little exciting about all of today's (and tomorrow's) digital development.