da blog

About a month ago (March 15-17) I attended an invitation-only event entitled “An International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop” in Amsterdam. Others have already blogged more contemporaneously about this event, including Chris Rusbridge, Amanda Hill and Jeremy Frumkin. They all provide a good summary of some of what took place, the activities which led up to the workshop and some sources of other information.

What’s prompted me to write about it now is the news that the outputs from that workshop are now visible, and the ongoing process of revising and amending them is taking place in a far more public forum on pbwiki. repinf.pbwiki.com is somewhere you should visit if you are, in the words of its homepage:

…. interested in:

1. developing coordinated action plans for specific areas of repository development

2. pursuing those plans

3. coordinating that activity internationally

An international workshop in March 2009 kicked off this process, which is now open to anyone willing to contribute.

If you have an opinion on things like interoperable identifiers, citation services, streamlining deposit workflows or (most contentiously) international repository organisations, you need to take a look at these materials. The workshop that produced them was a curious and mixed event, but it certainly had some positive features. It brought together interested experts from around the world to consider things that need doing with repositories that can only happen through joined-up international action. We did our best to focus on things that could be done in a reasonable timescale and that would produce clear benefits. At the end a group of funders – many of whom clearly weren’t quite sure what was expected of them – spent an hour or two considering the ideas that came out of the 4 workshop groups and voiced their own opinions about them. Some of the ideas drew widespread support from public and commercial organisations, whilst others were not yet clearly developed enough, or were still too parochial. Generally, there was a clear willingness to take action, but some of the plans needed more work before funders could act. The wiki is the way that that work will be done (with the contentious exception noted above.)

The idea of getting joined-up thinking between doers, thinkers and funders has succeeded. Anyone can read the material on the repinf wiki site, and anyone can edit it once they ask for a userid. Do it. Do it now.

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