"Repositories, looking back - looking forward" - Wolfram Horstmann, Göttingen State and University Library

Wolfram Horstmann, Director, Göttingen State and University Library, Germany, will talk about "Repositories, looking back — looking forward". Abstract: Digital Repositories are a phenomenon of the new millennium. Initially, they were designed to be sustainable „shelves“ on the web for documents provided by libraries and other research institutions. Besides this technical role, repositories also developed more sociological roles, notably being a vehicle for the Open Access movement and representing a significant step of libraries towards serving scholarly communication in the 21st century. They also became a proof-of-concept for an architectural design, namely managing digital research objects in a massively distributed way — rather than centralized. Time moved on and repositories today have new meanings in representing researchers CVs on the web, recording and reporting institutional research outputs, bibliometrics and altmetrics, publication systems and in research data management. Repositories have changed the faces and functions. Increasingly, digital objects in repositories appear on third-party sites — in the major search and discovery tools as well as social network sites for researchers. All these new functions represent a trend towards exploiting the machine interfaces of repositories rather than building user interfaces directly within the repository. New functions are on the horizon, for example supporting data diversity or distributed text and data mining . The future might indeed be that repositories become the backbone of tomorrow’s research heritage. About the speaker: Wolfram Horstmann is Director of the Göttingen State and University Library since 2014. From 2012 to 2014 he was Associate Director, Digital Library Programmes and Information Technologies, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, UK. From 2007 to 2011 he was CIO (Chief Information Officer) for Scholarly Information at Bielefeld University / Bielefeld University Library, Germany. The talk will take place on Monday 30 November at 1530 in Room C. The talk is part of the series of "Library Science Talks" jointly organized by the Swiss National Library, CERN and the Association of International Librarians and Information Specialists.