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IR and Document Management

 

« | Question and Answer Session | IR and eLearning »

Question:

We’ve been talking about institutional repositories today, which is largely about, entirely about, published work. I know that within these same organisations there’s been a lot of talk and a lot of investigation and some implementation of systems that do a similar thing internally — document management, enterprise content management, collaboration. Some of that’s for sharing published documents internally, some of it’s for facilitating the process of document creation. I would be interested to know how people on the panel have applied that same kind of thinking or have thought about integrating those two kinds of systems.

I’m certainly aware that the tolerance for inputting metadata is much lower in that initial stages of document creation, and sometimes faceted or tag based classification systems with limited metadata are better there. As you get later on in the life cycle of the document you need more rigorous controlled metadata.

Ideally we get to the stage where there are some systems internally managing that collaboration and production process and then someone just sort of presses a button and it goes into the institutional repository, but I’m sure we’re not there yet. So what’s being done across those linkages?

Response:

AS — We run a mile away from that, basically.

Because we have a document management system, but also because it’s largely used by the university administration. The academics don’t use that sort of stuff.

To get our institutional repository tangled up with that would mean risk management, copyright officers, security levels that we thought were inappropriate, and the whole question about what access does the library archivist have to some of this stuff too. There are a whole lot of things, so we decided quite consciously to keep them as separate issues.

We haven’t tackled the issue that you’ve picked up there of some documents in the documents system maybe should go into the repository. Apart from when I wrote the policy for our university, I said things like the annual report, documents like that should go into the IR.

Someone I spoke to here today raised exactly the same question, that certain university documents or certain government documents should eventually become public and then the open access repository is important. But I think using exactly the same repository for the two functions, given their quite different risk and security issues, is probably not a good idea.

CHR — I absolutely agree with Arthur [Sale] on that. You wouldn’t get anywhere if you tried to marry them at this point in time but there may be a way of bringing them together later.

At Monash, in terms of governance, we have an information management steering group which brings together library archivists, archivists, faculty representatives and so on. And some of the people are common to the content management system and repository activities. For example, the metadata people who are working on the Arrow project also did the basic metadata for the whole university for the content management system, so it kind of links at that level but not actually at the storage or dissemination level.

CK — I’d like to say, obviously a lot of the features between learning points and management systems, blackboard, web CT and institutional repositories and document management systems overlap. There are certain aspects to them which are specific to those systems like … there aren’t many document management systems that would have them be default. But I think we will see over next few years a merger of those sorts of systems together. Certainly at UQ we’re looking at using Fez as a scholarly research system, there have been some queries already about whether we’re using it internally as an intranet document management system, and I really can’t see why we can’t in some ways. There are a lot of features … security … but UQ as a whole going towards document management system, and we’re looking at products now as a whole.

Follow up:

With the New Zealand context we’ve also got the Public Records Act to take into account as well, so the need for document management systems is going to become quite fundamental as well. The Australians are a long way ahead of us too, I can tell you, in that area.

Response:

AS — I think we’ve all got deposit library requirements of that sort; we meet them separately. One of the things maybe I should just throw in here: a lot of the material in an IR if we’re talking about ones that capture research articles does not need to be preserved and it isn’t a security risk. It doesn’t need to be preserved because the journals are already doing that preservation role. If it’s a published document, raw copy is nice, … but it’s not essential.