Musings about librarianship: Aggregating institutional repositories - A rethink

"In recently months, I've become increasingly concerned about the competition faced by individual siloed institutional repository versus bigger more centralised repositories like subject repositories and commercial competitors like ResearchGate.

In a way the answer seems simple, just get someone to aggregate all the institutional repositories on one site and start building services on top of that to compete. Given that all institutional repositories already support OAI-PMH, so this seems to be a trivial thing to do. Yet I'm coming to believe that in most cases, creating such an aggregator is pointless. Or rather if your idea of a aggregator is simply getting a OAI-PMH harvester , point it at the OAI PMH endpoints of the repositories of your members and dumping everything into a search interface like VUFIND or even using something commercial like Summon or EDS without any other attempt to standardise metadata, and call it a day, you might want to back off a bit and rethink. For the aggregator to add value, you will need to do more work....."