Do you consider an Institutional Repository a viable component of a
records management system for those records that are put into it?  For
those of you that have not been exposed to an IR before, it basically
allows an institution and its members to save machine readable content
(documents, audio, video, web pages, etc.) to a system that the owner
has agreed to keep in perpetuity.  The original content is saved to the
system in its original form and then the owner agrees to migrate the
content as needed (if a document was in PDF and Adobe went out of
business, the owner of the IR would migrate it to whatever the new
standard was).

Beyond my original question, I'm curious what those of you in the
records management community think of these systems and the premise.  It
does not claim to replace the commercial records management systems that
are in use and I make no suggestion to that affect either.

Some background material can be found at the following:

http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html
http://archives.eprints.org/index.php
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october06/walters/10walters.html

Thanks.

____________________________________________
Ben Hope, CTO
Information Technology Office
NIH, Division of Library Services
[log in to unmask]
http://nihlibrary.nih.gov/ 

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance