Gulliver's Travels and the Future of Repositories

"...nature has adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper for their view: they see with great exactness, but at no great distance." - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726-1727)

Since Richard Poynder's seminal 2016 paper, 'Time to re-think the institutional repository,' with Q&A from one of the great thinkers in our field, Cliff Lynch, the future of institutional repositories has indeed been the topic of much thought, much talk, and a fair amount of activity.

Platforms and players are being sorted out between stodgy stalwarts such as DSpace, Fedora Commons constantly shape-shifting from Hydra to Hyrax/Hyku to Samvera Hyrax/Hyku to Valkyrie Super-Platforms and for-profit commercial offerings. And again, Cliff Lynch knocks another one out of the ballpark with his Fall 2017 CNI plenary talk 'Resilience and Engagement in an Era of Uncertainty,' focusing in large part on institutional repositories and the current sorting-out.

As in most things human, there s some truth and some self-aggrandizement behind all the talk and all the sorting out. Mere mortal librarians and developers charged with maintaining and filling up institutional repositories with as much Open Access content as possible are presented with a variety of bogeymen to fear or to make peace with.

But could it be that this is a false dichotomy, just like the one presented to the citizens of Lilliput and Blefuscu in Gulliver s Travels, as they war over the proper way to crack an egg? It need not matter how one cracks the egg, just that one finds a way to get to the contents through whatever means works for the customer.

This presentation will offer concrete suggestions as to how we as repository managers, digital humanists and developers can rise above the din of battle over the best way to crack the egg, and get on with giving our customers the dish they ordered they way the asked for it.