Cleaning out the Roach Motel: Transforming the Neglected IR into a Five-Star Scholarship Resort

Abstract

In 2008, Dorothea Salo published the memorable article, Innkeeper at the Roach Motel, in which she writes that libraries have consistently understaffed and undervalued repositories, hoping faculty will deposit their work without any incentive. When faculty refuse, libraries have thrown “open the repository to any sort of content in order to justify its existence” (Salo, 2008). Nearly ten years later, and this article still rings painfully true. How does an established repository correct the course, especially when the topic of deleting items and creating tombstones is so taboo? Elisabeth Shook, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Vanderbilt University, will discuss measures she’s taken to transform the roach motel IR into a clean resort for quality scholarship produced at VU, thus enabling the Vanderbilt Libraries to continue to advocate for sustainable open access.