Abby Clobridge's Building a Digital Repository Program with Limited Resources serves as an excellent step-by-step technical management guide for librarians and digital archivists to develop a digital repository program for their institution. The narrative is pragmatic with insights from some of her successful projects. The book is an easy read with each chapter providing illustrations, reading references, work templates, worksheets, workshop exercises, and assessment tools. She argues that the digital repository offers an opportunity for librarians to upscale their service proposition to their users in general and academia in particular. She therefore attempts to equip the reader with the intricacies of systems development which otherwise is often relegated to an IT professional. Clobridge's emphasis on the usefulness and relevance of digital repositories is a recurring theme throughout the book.
Clobridge has segmented the book into two sections. The first part focuses on strategic planning, technical overview and staff capability. This segment is particularly relevant to library directors and administrators and the material could be used to supervise start-up activities. It offers a broad overview of the key dimensions and guiding principles of developing a digital repository. Her chapter on strategic planning is interesting as it lays out the key processes and a user-centred approach to set requirements to develop the larger vision. She offers institutional examples of vision and mission statements and templates on needs assessment and focus group meetings. The section on technical overview keeps the user abreast of latest online technologies which could be integrated into digital repository programs. She goes to great lengths to compare open source repository systems like Dspace, Fedora, ePrints, Greenstone, CONTENTdm and others. She concludes with the need for multiple systems as user requirements and content types are diverse. Her depth of practical knowledge in the use of Picasa and Canto Cumulus would be very useful to digital curators. On staffing, she explores the training and skill requirements to successfully manage an end-to-end digital repository program. She has posted job descriptions for key job holders which can be adapted for start-up digital initiatives in libraries.
The second segment focuses on metadata development and principles for aggregating digital objects into collections which can then be marketed and promoted. Clobridge also teaches how to develop a service model and build effective relationships with faculty so that the collections are well utilised. Both metadata development and collection marketing are specialised competencies that require deep knowledge. Coleridge simplifies the practice and teases the reader to acquire broader knowledge in these domains. She offers pragmatic solutions to the complexity of metadata creation through “good enough” rather than “perfect is good” metadata approaches. In Appendix I she furnishes the reader with the specifics of how to initiate a metadata workshop where standardisation could be effected across the value chain.
Within this segment is a chapter on “Open Access”, an important development that redefines access to scholarly works. This chapter is integral to her approach in building institutional repositories. Unlike traditional archiving, open access adopts Chris Anderson's “long tail” theory which demands that everything should be made available, affordable and personalised (“infor-me”). She deals with the misconceptions of open access and argues for its importance in the scholarly realm. As lower access levels can undermine the return on investment and overall value of the initiative, this chapter logically leads one to the issue of sustainability and assessment. She ends this segment educating the reader about content proliferation techniques available in Web 2.0. In this segment she shifts from just providing technical management advice to explaining the intricate sociological relationships engendered in a digital repository initiative.
Abby Clobridge has demonstrated that even libraries with scarce resources and librarians with limited knowledge can effectively embark on a digital repository initiative. What is problematic, however, is that most academic institutions have invested in proprietary collaborative learning systems like Blackboard or Microsoft's SharePoint which have inbuilt repositories. Clobridge has not incorporated digital processes that are required in collaborative workspaces where user generated content represents Renganathan's “living organism” which are hardly constrained by fixated metadata descriptions. Web 2.0 for example is more than a content proliferation tool or engagement vehicle. It in itself creates new conversations out of which is born new knowledge. While the role of the faculty has been well articulated, the centrality of collaborative learning environments, with students and others participating in the digital asset creation design is under-stated. The challenge of the digital librarian in the academic domain is not only in aggregating disparate knowledge sources but to integrate multiple knowledge actors into the digital asset creation ecosystem. Abby Clobridge's view of a linear process of “collect, curate, manage, store, disseminate, access, and preserve digital objects” is myopic. Knowledge creation, distribution and consumption are dynamic processes where co-creation and “pro-sumption” best describes the augmented value of the digital asset. Secondly, Abby Clobridge dedicates only a single paragraph on “Partnership with IT” in discussing the technical aspects of digital repository creation. Increasingly academic learning environments are governed and defined by changing technological requirements. There is inevitably a need for an experienced IT consultant to co-direct the development which begs any mention. In fact the job description for the technologist in her template is limited to “assistance”. The growing sophistication of social and new media platforms will necessarily mean that the librarian would have to defer to an IT consultant on many aspects of the digital repository creation, particularly in systems integration, dynamic user design and migration issues.
As its preface rightly points out, the book is an introductory text and serves to educate more than instruct. The book is nevertheless interlaced with the author's a posteriori position on several issues. The book includes an index which facilitates easy search of technological concepts and is further enriched with two appendices and a bibliography. Abby Clobridge must be appreciated for her principled treatment of core values, i.e. strategic alignment with institutional objectives, open access to content and the centrality of the digital librarian in digital repository development. Her one-stop effort to converge strategic and operational dimensions with the entire gamut of digital repository creation and sustenance processes is a remarkable achievement. This book deserves its place on every librarian's shelf.
