In every iSchool course that I have taken, the primacy of the individual user is emphasized. Information systems, in whatever manifestation, must be useful to be maintained, and must be used to be useful. Bringing us back to the user. A recent Wired Science blog entry, ‘Clustered Networks Spread Behavior Change Fast’ by Jess McNally, explores some of the research into social networks and behavior change.
As common sense and many other studies have previously shown in the non-digital realm, the study “in the clustered network, 54 percent of the people signed up for the forum, compared to 38 percent in the random network, and almost four times as fast. Not surprisingly, Centola also found the more friends people had that also signed up, the more likely they were to return to the forum to participate.”
The institutional repositories that we read about in all of this weeks assigned reading are tied to academic institutions and scholarly research, which is itself an intricate and complicated social network. So many of the comments related in the Palmer and the Duranceau reading relate back to the communication (pre- and post- publication) within research groups and communities, and the difficulty of overcoming the social norms in these communities, even to implement novel and free tools provided by institutional IRs.
As the traditional role of the librarian is replaced by the digital curator, the liaison librarian, and the institutional repository manager, it seems to me that it is up to the information specialist (whatever their job title) to help facilitate these connections and to apply new tools as communication mechanisms.
While the study of arXiv and the high energy physics community is exciting in the context of this class, ‘Digital Curation,’ one case like this is not enough to convince me that the arXiv model will stick.