Thursday May 01, 2008

Capturing Campus Data

I sat in on a session with a local Information Architecture consultant yesterday that rekindled my interest in capturing data generated by the university.  I asked how we might expose our deep web content without overwhelming users not interested in that content.  Really, though, the problem starts much farther back.

We have an excellent GIS collection in addition to numeric data with which I am not as familiar, but we haven't, to my knowledge, engaged campus data producers in any large-scale fashion.  Presently, it's unclear to me that we'd know what to do with the data regarding preservation, access, organization, and intellectual property concerns.  Still farther back, I don't know that we've thought about building business cases to sell the services and facilities the Libraries could offer data producers.  It seems likely that  data producers will need strong business cases to incentivize the submission process.  

In our experience with the National Digital Information and Preservation Program it's clear that preservation motivates some but is often little motivation for others and is frequently too remote an issue to induce real action.  Certainly, the more demanding the process is for data producers, the more motivation they would need.  Building business cases to address producer needs is an important step.  I think that diversifying the benefits is equally important.

In addition to preservation, access could be a key carrot to lure potential submitters.   Reading Peter Brantley's thoughts on design beyond the interface inspired some dreamy thoughts about hiding preservation motives behind shiny access interfaces.  While this might not work for Mathematics or Chemistry, it could work for Design, Architecture, Art, or others.  

See White Paper: Behind a Law School's Decision to Implement an Institutional Repository for an interesting read on building business cases for institutional repositories.