Caltech Library News

Congratulations on your new position as Repository Coordinator, George! Could you give us an introduction to what repositories are and do?

Thank you.  I’m delighted to take on this new role. Repositories are collections of material. In the library world, the four primary types are: subject-based or institutional; textual or data. PubMed Central is an example of a subject textual repository. WormBase, is a subject data repository, hosted at Caltech, but not limited to Caltech discoveries. The Caltech Library has been collecting, highlighting, and disseminating the Institute’s scholarly output, primarily textual, through CaltechAUTHORS, since 2001. CaltechDATA has been the Institute’s data repository since 2014, providing a home for datasets for which there is no appropriate disciplinary option.

What created the need for this new position? 

CaltechAUTHORS has been a victim of its own success. Over the course of more than 20 years, the Library has operated the repository with a small team of developers, programmers, and library staff contributing effort as priorities allowed. CaltechAUTHORS has grown to more than 100,000 records and been the source of more than 25 million global file downloads. As the largest trove of scholarly output from any single university, the time had come to provide formal, dedicated oversight for the operation. Fortunately, when the job was posted, I happened to have more than 20 years of relevant experience to offer.

 What will a day in the life of the Repository Coordinator look like?

The next three to six months will see CaltechAUTHORS migrate from the EPrints platform, in continuous use since 2001, to InvenioRDM, the CERN-backed platform which underlies CaltechDATA. With such a large database, there are a great number of issues to consider and fields to map as we prepare to migrate.  As with many services which have developed organically, the metadata standards and collection policies have evolved over time. With a full-time position, it will be possible to focus on establishing a baseline for the metadata, while looking for opportunities to automate ingest and update processes.

What will you be able to do with the repositories now that you can give them your full attention?

The initial impetus for CaltechAUTHORS was to provide free, legally compliant access to as much Caltech scholarship as possible. In 2009, the Faculty Board refocused the Library’s effort to include documenting all of the Institute’s scholarly output, even if legal restrictions prevented the Library from distributing publisher-formatted articles. Fully addressing the Institute’s research output, current and stretching back to Caltech’s beginnings, will require multiple strategies to identify all of the material.