It doesn't have to be this way: Reimagining Institutional Repositories in-Transition

We derive lessons from the migration of our institutional repository from BePress to Preservica, specifically looking at the parts of the endeavor that were unnecessary, onerous, unreasonable and otherwise presented extra institutional and emotional labor for us as librarians. We transmute these lessons into utopian possibilities for how interactions with vendors, institutional partners, and stakeholders could go. We imagine a context in which institutional data had its own set of rights and standards not just for preservation but for transmission and usability between platforms in the event of a vendor change. We imagine the potential for institutions, whose data create the necessity for preservation and access platforms, to be able to advocate through cooperation and solidarity against vendor-created obstacles and lack of care. We provide examples of the problems we encountered (e.g. reclaiming data, dealing with third party storage, connecting vendors to institutional IT) and how they present an opportunity to reimagine relationships with vendors and the data itself.