Kowhai and Repositories

Kowhai at Aokautere Park September 17,2008. Photo taken by Graeme Siddle.

In line with the natural theme which this blog has developed, I wanted to put up a picture of kowhai. This is a photo of flowers on a kowhai in the grounds of Aokautere Park flowering at the moment, but there is also a larger tree in the bush remnant across Staces Road from the School. I don't have a particular connection between kowhai and repositories except that I guess kowhai is a repository of plant dna particular to this place.

I discovered this blog this morning and repositories are a tool which the Director has raised with me. John Mark Ockerbloom says:

At the same time, though, you can't plan the development of a library without thinking about its repositories. Repositories really are essential infrastructure for libraries but not simply as a place to "capture and preserve the intellectual output of university communities" (as a 2002 SPARC white paper put it), or, more pessimistically, as "a place where you dump stuff and then nothing happens to it" (as a 2005 JISC workshop annex put it).

Repositories: what they are, and what we use them for John Mark Ockerbloom post June 26, 2008.

The issue of repositories raises the issue not only of what do we do with the intellectual output of the New Zealand School of Export, but also of what is happening to the particular intellectual output in New Zealand which is related to international trade. Is this just for the National Library of New Zealand to look after, or an institution such as ours?

Graeme