As a teacher in Library & Information Studies I often give my students assignments to investigate a business case or to construct information management instruments. Usually, one of their products is a research paper. More and more, students publish these papers on the Internet, in best cases via a document sharing platform like Scribd. Those “YouTubes for documents” offer comment functions and are for that reason very popular. However, from my point of view as a teacher, those platforms miss the use of judgment of the documents in advance. Happily we now can use Open Access resources for self archiving (like E-LIS or CoRR)

Let IRs be a general computer backup service as well -- brilliant. I think this idea might just be the turning point...

Within the DRIVER project, three strategic studies on digital repositories and related topics have been carried out. The production of the studies was coordinated by SURF, the collaborative organisation for higher education and research aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT in the Netherlands, in close association with Amsterdam University Press and the following DRIVER partners: CNRS (FR ), the University of Gent (BE), ICM (PL), the University of Goettingen, the University of Bielefeld (GER), UKOLN and the University of Nottingham (UK).

Trapped by faculty apathy and library uncertainty, institutional repositories face a crossroads: adapt or die. The “build it and they will come” proposition has been decisively proven wrong. Citation advantages and preservation have not attracted faculty participants, though current-generation software and services offer faculty little else. Academic librarianship has not supported repositories or their managers. Most libraries consistently under-resource and understaff repositories, further worsening the participation gap. Software and services are wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management. These problems are not insoluble, but they demand serious reconsideration of repository missions, goals, and means.