digital repositories at the network level

The Internet Archive and the Center for History and New Media are teaming up to create the "Zotero Commons", a kind of open, shared scholarly repository. This is an experiment with some similarities to institutional repository initiatives at academic libraries. Notably, the two organizations tackling this problem are not big players within the academic library world. It'll be interesting to see if this takes off. In the long run, it may make the most sense to collect and preserve unpublished scholarship at a level that transcends academic institutions. Some have been fretting that this leaves libraries out of the picture. Someone in the comments section of Library 2.0 pointed out, however, that the Internet Archive is officially recognized as a library.