Cal Tech visit

On December 14 I was able to visit California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in Pasadena. What a different place, Cal Tech in Pasadena. The surrounding neighborhood bespeaks old, comfortable wealth and the campus itself is rich with foliage and calm. Where the students? bicycle hoards? football players? irksome panhandlers? And why does it seem familiar? The library felt like an old shoe, with indexes and reference books as on shelves at home.

I was met by Jim O'Donnell, Head of Collections, Information and Research Services and Head of the Geology & Planetary Science Library. He introduced me to several other people involved in maintaining CODA, their institutional repository. They were George Porter, Technical Reference Librarian in Library Information Technology (LIT), Betsy Coles, Applications Development in LIT, and Jay Walters, System/Network Administration in LIT.

Their approach to digitizing (CODA) couldn’t be more different from the efforts at USC. It has grassroots origins; it grows as needed with scarcely a guideline other than it must be faculty work, and must be academic; it is tended by these four eager persons who share their time willingly; and it runs on whatever servers they can spare for the effort. It is as they say a shoestring operation, and it works. It’s how techy types do it. I felt right at home.

I learned about how they manage their repository, which uses EPrints, an open access software. They started before D-Space at MIT was developed. Each person plays a role in operating CODA, with no one working at it full time. They even call upon the document delivery staff to assist with scanning, as they have the staff and equipment to handle the task. I liked their style of collaboration and experimentation, with their modest beginning leading to a fuller product as faculty became aware of the opportunity to participate and the team learned to handle a variety of materials.

They use CODA for theses, lab reports, technical reports, articles, report series, born-digital conference proceedings created using CODA, and complex geographical presentations. Right now CODA consists of separate groups of materials, with no cross-collection searching. Adding federated searching is a current goal.

At the end of the afternoon I met Kim Douglas and had a chance to brainstorm a bit about the direction of digital repositories, federated searching and other challenges. I was enticed to want to return and work with the CODA team in the spring, though working with OhioLINK's selected repository software would probably be the wiser thing to do.