In Praise of an IR
Institutional repositories have a mixed reputation and success levels and many of the difficulties Dorothea Salo outlined a couple of years ago are sadly familiar anyone who has worked in corporate digital publishing. New publishing systems are over-hyped, users are generally under trained, and disappointment always follows the expectations that content owners will maintain their own documents through a full life cycle. And let’s not talk about metadata much less file-naming conventions cause I might have flashbacks.
All the same, I confess a nerdy delight in sites like the Theses Canada, especially since it’s easy to identify which items come with downloadable files. Reading the first chapter or two of a thesis can quickly give me a sense of the major arguments in a field and a list of key texts I should work through.
My most recent IR find is from Simon Fraser where I was able to read a recent MA thesis by Anne Toews on Annie Buller and Beckie Buhay’s friendship (pdf).
Beckie Buhay (l) and Annie Buller (r) in the mid 1920s
Buller and Buhay were key figures in the early- to mid-twentieth century Canadian Communist Party (seen here sometime before 1929 in an image cropped from a Buller biography once downloadable from Progress Books). References to their organization, writing, and management work are scattered throughout most accounts of the period. Detailed information that both places them and their friendship in context and adds accurate information grounded in the historical record is much harder to find.
The combination of Google and Simon Fraser’s IR made it extraordinarily easy for me to find Toews’ work. And since Toews’ has done significant archival work, someday, if I find myself shaping a curiosity into a larger project, I’ll be able to find key records. That’s no a small thing when you’re interested in rather obscure topics.
There’s more work to be done of course—I still have lots of questions about Buhay—much I’m happy and grateful to have found and read Toews work.
