A Library Perspective: Data Wranglers in LibraryLand: Finding Opportunities in the Changing Policy Landscape

T. Scott Plutchak, director of Digital Data Curation Strategies, gave a talk about managing data, managing expectations, and opportunities to manage your institution in the move to make research data accessible. An historic view of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the funder’s mandates, and other policy formations set the stage for the discussion of the role of the library in this institutional challenge. In his new role at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Plutchak operates at The Edge of Chaos, with “data wranglers”— concerned parties from a variety of disciplines who all have an interest in data management and who come together to share ideas and move closer to an innovative solution.     

Dialectic: The Aims of Institutional Repositories

ABSTRACT

In the early 2000s, Clifford Lynch and Raym Crow had two different visions for the future of institutional respositories. Using their works as a starting point, T. Scott Plutchak discussed the initial aims of institutional respositories and addressed the dialectic between the view of institutional repositories as providing a method of preserving and nurturing new forms of scholarly communication and that of the institutional repository as a mechanism to transition to Open Access models for scholarly publications. Plutchak concludes that institutional repository librarians should focus efforts on collecting and preserving material outside of the formal publishing program in order to advance the work of our institutions, and to advance what libraries can do.