Digital Repositories and Sustainability

In two blog posts from earlier this year, Dorothea Salo mused on the issue of sustainability with regard to digital repositories.

In the first post, entitled (aptly) "Sustainability," Salo was inspired to think about the sustainability of digital repositories when she learned that arXiv is looking for different funding sources because Cornell is no longer willing to foot the bill. The question that this brings to Salo's mind has to do with role of libraries in the support of digital archives, particularly open access digital archives. She asks, "Are we [libraries] really memory organizations, or are we only memory organizations for print?" Salo seems to lean toward the belief that the library's role in the maintenance of digital archives should be larger. This sentiment reminded me of the article by Sayeed Choudhury and Timothy Stinson that I posted on a few weeks ago; they, too, envisioned the library as having a prominent role in the future of digital archives.

Salo also spends a bit of time in her post venting her feelings about irresponsible digital curation. She cites an instances in which searching for a long-term home for an item that originated outside of her institution she came across a repository that had been abandoned. This repository, Salo relates, seems to have been "hacked up" by two people in their spare time, and abandoned after the founders "got a couple of publications out of the attempt." Understandably, Salo finds this sort of behavior inexcusable, particularly because other won't attempt to establish repositories for this discipline while this one is still in existence. Such irresponsibility is, she says, a betrayal of trust.

The second post, called "Object lesson: when researchers run repositories," relates the story of the Mana'o anthropology repository. Dr. Alex Golub, founder of this repository, is no longer able to maintain it and is attempting to find an institution that will pick up it his stead. Although she considers the Mana'o repository a worthy project with the best of intentions (unlike the one cited in the previous post), Salo believes that any one-person effort of this type will eventually have to be rescued, and that it is irresponsible not to anticipate this from the inception. Salo again muses on the role of the library in rescuing such digital archives, naming librarianship's "continuing error" as the fact that "they have no infrastructure or plan in place for accomplishing these rescues."

Salo present us with two scenarios in which the sustainability of digital repositories is at issue. In the first case, the repositories failure was due to the negligence of its founders. In the second scenario, the well-intentioned creator of a repository came to a point at which he was no longer able to handle it, and had not planned for such an eventuality. The larger issue in both of these cases is who will pick up the slack. Salo, being an academic librarian, questions the library's role in the maintenance of digital archives and repositories. However, one could also put things in a larger context and ask what type of institution is best suited to be the custodian of the kinds of data repositories and archives that are emerging. Should the burden fall on libraries? Or are agencies like the Nation Science Foundation better suited to handle such large projects? Or should new entities be founded whose sole purpose is to create and curate digital repositories? Finding the best home for a particular digital curation project is one way to ensure its continued sustainability.