Manchester University IR Project Blog Sharing news, opinions and general information about the University of Manchester's Institutional Repository (IR) Project.

Hi - I'm Scott, an assistant on the Institutional Repository Project.

One of my main tasks on the project is to carry out usability studies that will inform and guide some of the technical developments of the project. As a team we are mindful that the repository services that are established must fit into the average academic's natural working practices as seamlessly as possible. This involves us going out talking to academics, finding out as best we can what their 'natural working practices' are; and so I've spent a lot of time lately asking academics questions about the self-archiving of their scholarly work and how much they know about the issues surrounding Institutional Repositories.

Scurrying around the campus with my paper questionnaires I've started to collect a small but growing body of data that I will hopefully be able to collate into nice, neat pie-charts and graphs. We have a core of 'early adopters' who are helping us with these studies but, as invaluable as they are, they cannot provide us with usability data for every possible research output that the University creates.

It was for this reason that I contacted our Music Librarian here at John Rylands University Library for a list of friendly music types that I could go and have a chat with; questionnaire at the ready. None of our 'early adopters' produce the kinds of research outputs that the Music School create and so I was pleased when three music lecturers agreed to meet with me.

After I had met with the three lecturers I sat down with my questionnaire results and tried to pull together some recurring themes. Three respondents is clearly not enough to make sound scientific conclusions but it was enough to get a flavour of musician's attitudes to open access and self archiving.

Early Conclusions

• Music has fundamentally different concerns to published literature where open access is concerned.
• It is difficult to describe music.
• There is an enthusiasm for a central repository which can create lists of research outputs.
• Technology is fast transforming modern music research outputs.

The first theme is about royalties. An academic who makes his published articles open access is not jeopardising his revenue stream. A musician who makes his music open access most certainly is. It is for this reason that the vast majority of music research outputs will most likely be either metadata only or have the attached sound file embargoed indefinitely. The key concern then, as far as the repository is concerned, is to provide the researcher with the ability to describe the music as best they can (and perhaps to link to where the music is available to purchase).

This question of description is in itself a complicated business. I took a list of metadata fields with me to the lecturers and asked them which should be absolutely mandatory, which were not necessary, and which required amending. If it wasn't already, it became very clear that it can become a wickedly complex task to satisfactorily provide the necessary fields to describe all of the varying types of potential musical outputs. Also, there are myriad ways a person can be related to a piece of music. Should the date relate always to the premiere or the publication or both? Is a new work of Beethoven's Fifth really a new work or a new manifestation of an old work?...There are many tricky issues to tackle when creating the submission form for a musical research output and the solutions to these issues are as yet unclear.

What did become clear was that at present there is a strong desire for the kinds of functionality that the repository hopes to provide; key of those is the ability to create dynamic lists of research outputs to display on personal websites for example. All three musicians agreed that this would also be useful from an administrative point of view as a way to list the entire research output of the school.

Dr. Ricardo Climent was one of the lecturers kind enough to meet with me to discuss Institutional Repositories - he also gave me a guided tour of the new NOVARS research centre building on Bridgeford Street (pictured, right) which is a state of the art facility for electroacoustic composition, performance and sound-art research programmes. He explained to me that they had been recently investigating the possibility of the Research Centre setting up its own subject repository.

The centre creates large sound files up to a gigabyte in size which currently have no single location to be stored. These files are large multi-channel files over a gigabyte in size and so would fall outside the remit of the Institutional Repository, but the metadata could certainly be stored in the central repository with a link to the source file. As Dr. Clement and I talked it became clear that technology was driving change at a fast rate and that organising and sharing these new kinds of music files was posing challenges not encountered before.

It will be an interesting process exploring the best ways to deal with the unique problems that musical research outputs pose in terms of repository submission, display, and re-use. Not least because it will delay us having to deal with anthropological audio-visual material!