We launched the European.eu [sic] site on 20 November and huge use – 10 million hits an hour – meant it crashed. We are doing our best to reopen Europeana.eu in a more robust version. Meanwhile, the site you’re in now is the project development site, with a video to give you a tasts [sic] of what’s on the real Europeana site. Unfortunately this project site is only in English: the real Europeana is in all EU languages.

I’m not usually one to gloat on the failure of others, but I do think that this is pretty embarrassing. The first digital library of European art and culture opens its doors and… goes off-line for a full month? Yes, the amount of traffic is significant, but surely a scalable architecture of some sort was used that should have been able to shoulder this.

Or, perhaps the solution is to put Europeana on a cloud. But that would mean dealing with companies like Google or Amazon who maintain clouds – or maybe to launch a central European data center than provides hosting to projects like this.

Edit: and now they should work, too.

I find the binary, hypothesis-supported-or-not approach to the subject that is manifest in the article slightly problematical, for example in the way that incentives are counted, or the fact that the popularity of self-depositing in some disciplines is discussed in conjunction with the overall size of IRs, while the two can be seen in total independence from one another.

Still, some interesting points are made. From the article:

Another issue came from the difficulty in finding the institutional repository itself. In some instances, several searches within the institution’s website were required to discover if they indeed sponsored a site or if they were contemplating creating one. Typically, if a search contained any reference to an institutional repository, then in-depth reviews of the successful search returns were required to see if a link or URL was provided to the IR’s main page. Although content is individually searchable from various web engines, the lack of visibility within an institution’s own web site speaks to poor recruitment and incentive strategies. If contributions are desired from faculty, then a more visible presence on the institute’s main page, either in the form of a notice or a hyperlink, or on the institution’s library page may provide greater awareness and a willingness to contribute.

The main issue I see is how institutional repositories are conceptualized in completely different ways by those who run them (librarians/IT services people) and by those who are supposed to deposit in them (researchers). By and large researchers don’t want to deposit, store or archive their work, they want to publish it. Publishing serves the self-interest of researchers, while depositing, particularly in an institutional repository (versus a disciplinary one) mostly serves the interest of the institution and has very little (if any) benefit for the researcher.

I believe that this can be countered by combining the institution’s publishing service and the IR – have all content produced by researchers at X University electronically published by X University Press and professionally presented on XUP’s website. Print on demand services (which may be outsourced to various degrees) can be associated with the content, as well as social tagging/bookmarking tools, discussion etc. Optimal findability via both commercial and specialized search engines and use of feeds to enable access to all content on multiple levels (such as through mobile devices) should also be key goals.

In reality, the presentation of repository content and its distribution via the available channels is often sub-optimal from the perspective of the researcher (for example, I can’t seem to find any of the content in my own university’s repository via Google Scholar). The problem, at least that’s my impression, lies with the dominant emphasis on the archive as a sort of box that holds content, versus an emphasis of the content itself (without the box) and on marketing said content aggresively to potential readers.

While I’m quite aware that depositing in an IR and publishing are usually interpreted as two different processes, I believe that this is an unfortunate segregation, because it bears the risk of making IRs a content wastebasket for material that can’t be published elsewhere. Of course an IR can also be used to make available content that has already been published elsewhere, but once again the question is how much merit this has from the perspective of the researcher.

Deposit mandates and aggressive content collection are one approach, but I would argue that improved marketing of content could achieve a lot, possibly more, because it would create an incentive to publish as outlined above that is currently not given (see also my recent rant on creating incentives).

I’m sitting in the lobby of Harbour Centre, looking through panorama windows at the Pacific and enjoying what must be my fourth cup of coffee today (jet lag further aggravates my already serious caffeine addiction). After arriving on Tuesday I had the chance to walk around in the sun for several hours and see lovely Vancouver. I also heard a series of very exciting talks, notably John Wilinsky of the Public Knowledge Initiative and Anurag Acharya, lead engineer for Google Scholar. I also had the opportunity to throw questions at them while they were literally gasping for air from being hounded by equally curious individuals. I’ll post a summary later, but for now I want to point to the excellent live blog coverage over at the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Blog (or PKPSPCB, as pros call it). If I’m lucky they might even post a summary of my talk. No rush with that though, as I’m sure they have their collective hands more than full right now.