The Successful Repository

This APSR event on 29 June in Brisbane was really excellent. Besides listening to top quality local and international speakers the day also afforded the opportunity for the relatively new Aus/NZ users of Digital Commons to get together for the first time, at the end of the day.

It was particularly satisfying to listen to Susan Gibbons from Rochester University in the US and reflect that Digital Commons is an excellent product as it allows us to do all the significant things she mentioned, such as creating Personal Researcher Pages. Hearing the other speakers from UQ, QUT etc. highlighted again that we have all gone down similar paths with respect to policy matters, selling the idea of the repository to researchers, etc - and will continue to move down similar paths and can learn a lot from each other. Hence the importance of the Aus/NZ DC users keeping in touch.

An interesting point made by Susan was that when talking about the institutional respository, librarians need three distinct "voices" and that it is important to focus on the issues that are relevant to each audience and not to mix them: institutional voice, faculty/academic staff voice and library voice.

A concluding observation - it seemed to me that both locally in Aus/NZ and in the US, that self-archiving is just not taking off and the academics simply prefer the Library to do it for them. Again - this was gratifying to hear as it is a strategy purposefully chosen at Bond University.