| Abstract: | Sometimes a word acquires so many meanings that it becomes difficult to use clearly. This happened to 'portal', and it may be happening to 'repository'. There is a lot of development work underway that claims to relate to repositories, that might previously have been related to 'archives', 'digital libraries' or 'content management systems'. Defining the boundaries is probably a waste of time, so for the purposes of this article, I'll take a reasonably pragmatic approach, which is to say a repository is a digital object store into which material can be deposited. Repositories therefore offer information professionals a way of becoming more involved in the processes whereby digital information is made shareable, applying their expertise earlier in the information cycle than has often been the case. |
