Early returns on an institutional repository: an exploration of the validity and functionality of pocketknowledge

This poster presentation will reflect qualitatively on the challenges and opportunities of PocketKnowledge (http://pocketknowledge.tc.columbia.edu/home.php) as an institutional repository.

The main question explored is whether such repositories are best understood as new competitors in the academic publishing world or as on-going documentations of the larger intellectual life of the institution. The early experience of one such repository, PocketKnowledge - a social archive developed and implemented by EdLab, a research unit of the Gottesman Libraries, Teachers College Columbia University - reveals that users are motivated not only to participate in an institutional repository, but also to document their intellectual life understood more broadly than publication. This suggests that the latter understanding of an institutional repository is a more reasonable, incremental expectation in what is surely an uphill battle against the long-established prestige of publishing in printed academic journals, and that institutional repositories such as PocketKnowledge should consider the strategic addition of functionalities that can highlight the intellectual life of the institution, not simply the intellectual production of its members.