First advocacy plans made public

One of the key milestones along the path of the RePosit project for the individual partner HEIs is the creation of an advocacy plan for each institution (or review and updating of an existing plan within the RePosit framework). These plans describe the overall strategy for communications around awareness of, engagement with and deposit into the institutional open-access repositories (including specifically via the link from the CRIS/RMS), and these are the plans that will be followed for the second half of the project's life to hopefully produce the results we are anticipating - increased deposits and increased users. In some cases, the plans include the detailed timetable of activities that will be undertaken, in other cases these timetables are stored in a separate document - mainly because such detailed activities lists are by their nature more fluid and need to be revisited and updated regularly, in comparison with the overall advocacy strategy documents.

At the moment, those advocacy plans available to view are for the University of Plymouth, Keele University and the University of Leeds. Of course, these plans will potentially be revised as the project progresses and the experience at each institution grows.

All the plans have been drawn up individually but with the sharing of ideas and help across the whole project team. The plans also use the lessons learned from our literature review of previous JISC projects in and around this area.


posted by: Lizzie Dipple

Notes from third project team Skype call on 22nd Dec 2010

This week saw our third project Skype conference call, despite problems caused by snow for some people on Monday.

Skype call meeting minutes 22nd Dec 2010

We had fewer attendees than usual, but we still managed to cover good ground. There were a few specific issues to discuss - such as the statistics for system users, which are proving tricky to calculate or extract, and the use of certain advocacy materials as related to the format. We looked at when the various advocacy plans are expected to be approved for public viewing outside the project team - with at least two due up on the blog this week. And we also had a useful discussion of how preparations are going for our next project team meeting - to be held in Leeds in January. This is not just an ordinary team meeting, since we will have a conference call link-up with the QMUL designers for part of it, plus - very importantly - there will be an audience of invitees for the first two trial-run advocacy presentations. With this in mind, we hope to have one more team Skype conversation prior to meeting up in Leeds.

posted by: Lizzie Dipple

Demonstration of Symplectic Elements and DSpace, 17th December 2010

After the meeting last week with Queen Mary Creative Services, I arranged to provide a demonstration of QMRO repository and PubLists, the local installations of the DSpace and Symplectic Elements systems, to the designers who will be working on our advocacy materials. It was hoped that this would give QMCS a better idea of how the systems worked, how they are connected, and why this is important.

I provided a comparison demonstration, showing how content would normally be entered into DSpace; how each field has to be populated manually, the file upload and permission granting process. I then showed them how items are deposited using the RePosit model. By doing this, it was easy to demonstrate how much quicker and simpler deposit is when the metadata is provided through a linked system, requiring only the file upload and permissions to be granted for deposit to be completed.

The demonstration helped to put the project and the systems into context for the designer, Dan Boom, and hopefully gave him some ideas of how to illustrate this in our materials.

Dan was also able to give me a short update on the progress made so far, that they have begun work to produce some project branding for us, and that they hope to have some early examples of these and other materials ready for our meeting in January 2011.

Sarah Molloy

Queen Mary, University of London

Snowed in - so Skype call postponed

With several parts of the country snowed in today and people unable to access their computers, unfortunately we've had to postpone our third Skype conference call from this afternoon. Hopefully there will be a slight thaw this week, so we'll manage to catch up on Wednesday instead. With the Leeds project team meeting in mid January and the Christmas break in between, any further preparations for the two trial-run advocacy presentations due to take place at that project meeting need to be sorted out now.

Lizzie Dipple

Collaborative project team

Being part of this JISC project team has turned out to be very enjoyable and a fantastic learning experience for us all. This is due to the diverse roles of the project team in the different Universities and the professional expertise of Symplectic.

Roles range across the Library, the Central Research Office through to Academic Systems. There is also a range of roles within the library giving the perspectives of the Library Liaison staff through to Electronic Resource staff. Having all these different perspectives helps us all to understand how our own University works and was very helpful when putting together the advocacy plans (where we shared good practice).

It has also proven informative to share the experiences of the partner Universities at different stages of their repository implementation. For example those of us who have never had a repository before can learn from both the successes and mistakes of others further down the line. One key message that the project team have learned is that you can't just raise awareness of the repository once, as a one-off exercise, there has to be continuous promotion. Also the more established repositories can also learn new tricks: for example, colleagues have been very interested how Keele has linked its publications database (and repository) to individual staff webpages. This has encouraged academic colleagues to keep their entries up to date (and deposit), as it instantaneously updates their web page, all from one system!

I'm sure there will be more shared knowledge and experiences next year as we move into the advocacy stage.

Ellie James

Keele University

Meeting with QM Creative Services, 13th December 2010

So, after all our hard work coming up with contextual and content ideas for our advocacy materials, these were dutifully sent off to Queen Mary Creative Services (thanks Lizzie). In a follow up to this, QMCS asked to meet with us to get a clearer idea of what we wanted.

Lizzie and I have therefore spent a very fruitful meeting with members of the design team this afternoon, from which the following has been agreed:

1. The first priority is to design a brand and theme that will be carried across all materials.
2. QMCS will then work on the slide library template ready for the next project meeting on 13th/14th January 2011 (when the first trial-run presentations are to take place).
3. QMCS will also begin developing some of the early design ideas for other materials once the theme and brand have been agreed.

I am providing a demo to Creative Services on Thursday morning (16th December) to give them a better idea about the repository and research publications management systems and how they work, what they are for, etc. This should hopefully help to clarify what we as a project partnership are doing and also tie in with the outlines that we have sent them.

They've also given us things to think about in terms of running our advocacy/communication campaigns. For example, our web presence, which could be providing somewhere quick and easily accessible to get up to date information, not just about the JISC project but about the messages that we are trying to communicate in our advocacy plans. They've also suggested some other mechanisms by which we can give our project a higher profile (for example, year planners on walls are a cheap way to put up information - and have it there all year!) in order to drive users to the project and get the message out more widely.

Whilst we will not be able to do all these things due to time and money constraints, they are useful things to think about for the future, perhaps once we have gone our separate ways. So lots to mull over, and definitely lots of things for me to add to my own shopping list (if I can but find the money). The Head of Creative Services did ask me if I was planning to move in...

Sarah Molloy (QMUL)

Wireframes

Now that we have a set of user stories, as discussed in a previous post, we can look at turning these outline stories into concrete instances which can be presented to users. In order to achieve this, we are employing a technique used in graphic and website design called "wireframing". In this process we decide what materials we would like to produce, and then we layout content in the space with little to no emphasis on how the final product will look. Instead we are simply looking at what information we wish to present, and roughly where on the page we want that content to appear.

We chose two of our user groups to be the focus of advocacy materials: academic authors and senior managers (it is assumed that librarians are mostly already sold on this technology, and don't need the same level of persuasion). For each of these groups we chose a couple of advocacy mediums, thus:

• Academic authors:
  
  
  
  • Postcards; to be handed out at events, available for collection at library front desks, attached to pay cheques, etc.
  
  
  • DL (0.3 A4 size) How-To leaflet; to be handed out at events, available for collection at library front desks, etc. Ideal for pinning next to your computer monitor.
  
  
  • Poster; to be pinned up all over campus
  
  
• Senior managers:
  
  
  
  • Postcards; to be handed out at events, available for collection at library front desks, etc.
  
  
  • A4 product sheet; to be handed out at events, or delivered directly to senior manager's offices
  
  

Below is a screenshot of one of the wireframes in progress, showing the DL size leaflet which contains the How-To for the academic author on depositing their full-text into the digital repository via their CRIS.




Each of these wireframes can then be taken by the project partners and instantiated in their institutional colours, designs, fonts and so forth. This process ensures that the generic project outputs are appropriate for all institutions undertaking a CRIS to Repository link, irrespective of their software solution, and also does not enforce any kind of branding upon the adopting institution.

- Richard Jones, Symplectic Ltd

Notes from second project team Skype call on 25th Nov 2010

In our inaugural Skype project team RePosit conference call we agreed that we wanted to have a full-on discussion of the various advocacy plans, and so we organised a second Skype call for Thursday 25th November. It was another successful call which ended up lasting about 1¾ hours.

Skype call meeting minutes 25th Nov 2010

Basically we looked at each draft advocacy plan in detail, and found there were a number of recurrent themes. The plans naturally need to be made up of two halves: the overall strategy and then the detail of who/when/what you want to do. Working out that detail gives you a timeline to work against and makes you aware of lead times, for instance for high-level meeting agendas or inclusion in existing training materials. Some partner HEI plans already contained both sections, in other plans we need to flesh out one or the other part more. Another key element of the plans is the background context. Since the plans will act as exemplars of advocacy planning in the pack of project outputs, it is important that any other HEI looking them up can immediately see which situations are most relevant to them.

Some key points that came up for discussion included that planned success criteria must be measurable (SMART). Having subject librarians on board can help not only with dissemination of the message to the academics, but also to get feedback on how awareness is hopefully growing. In fact, having a project team made up of representatives from key stakeholders (librarians, research office, academics and IT) is the best approach. A long-standing repository system is not the same thing as an embedded one, so you have to keep going with continual advocacy. When content is made public, such as on personal web pages, people are much keener to make sure that data is correct and up to date.

Overall, though, something that we all found was that working together like this - sharing different perspectives, different experiences and so on across the varied members of the RePosit project team - is an absolutely fantastic benefit of being involved in the project.

We will have one more conference call before Christmas to work out some of the details for our next project meeting, which takes place in Leeds in mid January.


posted by: Lizzie Dipple

User Stories

In a previous post we discussed the fact that there are many reasons why someone might care about a link existing between their CRIS and their Digital Repository. We identified upwards of 20 such reasons, and alluded to the fact that each of these reasons resonates more with some people than it does with others, and emphasises more the CRIS or the Repository.

In this post we're going to have a look at some concrete examples of the user stories that we have developed from the "Whys", to give you a flavour of what the project outputs will contain.

A story for academic authors: how can this help me raise my research profile?

CRIS and Digital Repository integration is all about raising your research profile. This happens by enhancing your research's visibility through your digital repository and increasing your potential for being cited. This is not only in the public interest - the people who ultimately funded your work - but it also increases how easy it is to find and read your work, and therefore also increases its re-usability. By ensuring that your research information and full-text content is available, it will be easier for your institution to assemble high-quality REF returns, while also making it easy for you to meet your funder mandates on open access deposit. As an additional advantage, your research will be cared for and preserved for future readers. As a result your research presence is significant, and remains so for longer.


A story for librarians: using research information management to drive institutional strategy

Shrinking library budgets mean that it is important to find cost-effective solutions to support your institution's strategy, and to participate in the global research economy. By providing public access to publicly funded research through your Digital Repository, you are provisioning for long-term storage and preservation across time and software advances of institutional assets, which are valuable in this economy. This benefits the institution's standing by increasing the amount of research content which can be made available through the repository, the CRIS and any other systems which build institutional web-presence from the information held there.


A story for senior staff: increasing citations in support of the REF

Increasing the visibility of your research is going to be extremely important in the next round of metrics-based research evaluation. You can increase the visibility of your research by improving its online discoverability. This is not just in the public interest (although it is), but will provide you with the opportunity to raise your institution's profile in areas such as HE rankings, and Student Surveys. Ultimately, this increased discoverability and visibility increases the opportunity for citations to your researcher's work, which will support a high quality REF return.


There are a number of other stories that we are working on, and as you can see from the above we are still in the early period of refining them into something which can be clearly presented. In time we will develop and make available advocacy material wireframes and slide-decks in support of these stories, and we will shortly be publishing blog posts on those topics.

- Richard Jones, Symplectic Ltd.

What can we learn from Prof Weasel and Kooey the Goose: project chat with Gareth Johnson

In our Exeter project meeting, we discussed different ways of promoting a CRIS (or choose your preferred term!) to repository link. Readers may be familiar with the (in)famous library education video series created by Gareth Johnson (University of Leicester aka llordllama). In particular, “The Professional Librarian’s Guide to Understanding Academic Copyright” is well known and has been used in repository training sessions – I’ve used it on occasion (with permission!) as an icebreaker and a painless way of explaining the consequences of academic authors’ tendency to sign away rights to their work. Would this type of video be a useful advocacy or educational tool in the CRIS to Repository context?

Although a lot of our advocacy work will be focussed on our home institutions, communicating RePosit findings to the wider repository and library community is very important – particularly to maximise awareness of the training materials produced during the project. We will want to explore the pros and cons of the emerging deposit method and hope to facilitate a community of practice around the new CRIS/repository model.

I had a very helpful discussion with Gareth around a couple of key issues (i) whether videos in this field were feasible and what form they might take (ii) community building.

(i) of course, whether Gareth produces videos in this area is very much his call. Having produced many videos, he’s learned that it can pay to focus a video on one main issue or message e.g. “what is a CRIS?”. So a possibly approach would be a series of videos from which to pick and mix according to the specific requirements of a training session. This could fit very well with the emerging RePosit approach of a slide bank from which “stories” can be pulled together to appeal to a specific audience. From us (RePosit – or anyone else promoting this type of deposit model), Gareth would like any specific quotations or opinions from researchers, librarians, administrators which could be used to inform any videos he puts together. As Gareth says, it’s useful for the videos to provide food for thought and look at a topic from several angles.

(A useful tip from Gareth: why not email all your keen depositors and ask them to provide an attributable quote for use in promotion – this can yield surprisingly rich results.)

(ii) Perhaps we could offer the emerging “community” multiple options/ discussion venues and see where the traffic goes? So if the RePosit Google Group doesn’t take off, maybe try a Facebook page – this may be more user friendly. Are there any established groups we could piggy back on?

“The Professional Librarian’s Guide to Understanding Academic Copyright”

Pecha Kucha at RLUK Conference

Gave this presentation at RLUK Conference last week.

JISC RePosit Presentation to RLUK, Nov10

View more presentations from Bo Middleton.

Here's a link if you need it: http://www.slideshare.net/bomiddleton/rluk-nov10-jiscrepositpechakucha?from=share_email

Turns out they had a prize for best Pecha Kucha presentation - wish I'd known that beforehand. Did get a couple of questions though - and even feedback afterwards - people genuinely interested in whether the CRIS-Repository model will make a difference to number of deposits (BTW - the presentation that won the prize was (I'm told) the same one that won at the Repository Fringe this year 'Repositories are like Cakes' - will post a ref when I can find one).


posted by: Bo Middleton

The Why of the "Whys"

At the heart of the RePosit re-usable advocacy materials is a core list of reasons why connecting your Research Management System to your Digital Repository is a Good Thing. Why you should care. Why it is good for you. Why it is good for your institution. This list of "Whys" contains the following arguments, in no particular order:

1. Library budgets are shrinking
2. It will raise your research profile
3. It gives you the potential for increased citations
4. It increases the discoverability/visibility of your research
5. It's quick and easy to use
6. It will allow you to improve the business decisions of your institution through business intelligence
7. It's a single point of entry to all research management needs
8. It can provide research statistics and analysis
9. It improves the reusability of your content
10. It's in the public interest
11. It supports research into teaching
12. It enhances your ability to return to the REF
13. It improves the student experience of the institution
14. It provides full-text content storage
15. It can help inform institutional strategy
16. It can help inform competitive parity analysis
17. It can enhance your institution's overall profile
18. It can help manage institutional assets
19. It can help you meet funder deposit mandates
20. It improves the discoverability of your research via search engine
21. It increases your ability to comply with copyright requirements

It is worth noting that the emphasis of RePosit is not on the repository or the RMS but on the link between them. Some of these "Whys" are more weighted towards one side or the other, as you would expect. We have attempted, when developing arguments behind each of these points, to balance the emphasis between these two systems appropriately, in order to try to draw out what is relevant to the integration itself.

Each of the different "Whys" on this list is relevant more to one group of people than another. For example, that it provides an opportunity to generate a more complete picture of an institution's research output is far more relevant to senior staff than it is to academic researchers, while the fact that it is integrated with SHERPA RoMEO is something which appeals mostly to librarians. We therefore identified three groups of people to whom we would be pitching the idea:

• Academic authors
• Librarians
• Senior management

Then we took each of the "Whys", and we constructed more substantive arguments underneath the short descriptions above, and we looked at which reasons were closely related together (e.g. business intelligence and institutional strategy). It is from this matrix, then, that we will construct the advocacy materials which will be one of the re-usable outputs of the RePosit project.

In future posts we will discuss the User Stories that emerge from the above matrix, as well as the advocacy material wireframes which tell those user stories, and the slide-deck that can be used to present those stories to our target groups.


- Richard Jones, Symplectic Ltd

Progress Report - Queen Mary

The battle to launch QMRO goes on here. Frustration is beginning to kick in due not to lack of interest by academics, but actually in our seeming incapacity to reach the end stage. Whilst we have academics really interested in helping to get things moving, not least the Principal himself, we have gotten a little stuck with the final technical issues. Working closely with our IT Services team, we are getting ever closer to launching the repository, something I have been looking forward to for some few years now. Whilst a lot of work has gone into making this happen, we seem to have fallen foul of the summer holiday black hole, when other projects got prioritised, and which (over-running as they always do) meant that we also fell into the start of term black hole immediately afterwards.

However, it's not all bleakness. We're currently working on using the data from PubLists to provide a Publications web site and this is nearing completion at last. With links to the repository and published versions on publisher web sites, this should be a really good way to promote the repository and open access, and therefore drive engagement. Having worked out a few kinks, we're at the stage where we'll be able to launch the site soon and this is really exciting!

I'm currently drafting a communications strategy for QMRO, which will help us to plan our advocacy and training strategy over the coming months and will help to formalise ways of highlighting the work we are doing.

I've also recently attended a meeting with some of the Sherpa-LEAP partners and this has got me thinking about how we can tap into/share knowledge and expertise. So lots to do!

Sarah Molloy (QMUL)

Notes from project team Skype call on 11th Nov 2010

As part of our need to stay in contact and collaborate together, as well as tracking progress in between full project meetings, we had our inaugural Skype project team RePosit conference call last week on Thursday 11th November. After a few technical teething problems with microphones, headsets and one dropped internet connection we then got properly stuck into the discussions. Sadly the full team were not all available, but we still managed to cover a lot of ground over what in the end was 1¾ hours.

Skype call meeting minutes 11th Nov 2010

We started with a quick update of the situation at each site, then spent some time looking at the various action points and reviewing progress towards them - which sparked off several discussions along the way. Then we discussed our feedback to the 'whys' message slides (for senior managers, librarians and academic authors) and 'user story' wire frames for advocacy materials content (for senior managers and academic authors) that Richard Jones at Symplectic has been concentrating on producing over the last month or so. One urgent point linking into that which we needed to cover was our potential use of QMUL's Creative Services team to help with some of the design work for our advocacy materials, since their lead times are fairly long, and we talked about different types of branding for the project and the messages we need to get across. Finally, we talked about our initial thoughts on the first of the advocacy plans that have been drawn up (for Plymouth - ahead of schedule). Overall the call and discussions were seen as so successful that we've agreed to have several more Skype conference calls - basically regular opt-in short calls - with the next one aimed at a full discussion of all five advocacy plans.


Posted by: Lizzie Dipple

Project update from University of Plymouth

Now that the bulk of information literacy teaching is past, I have been working on the 2nd meeting action points. I have drawn up the draft communication strategy for PEARL (Plymouth Electronic Archive and Research Library) and have circulated it to the Project Team for their comment. It was a case of having done lots of reading of case studies, looking back at the case studies and the WRRO example, we reviewed at the 2nd Team meeting and looking at RSP materials and other repository sites, I set aside a day and made completing the draft, my sole task for that day.

I am looking forward to the Project teams's comment and seeing the other advocacy plans as our team has lots of experience and knowledge however we are geographically spread across the country. The Skype meeting on Thursday will be invaluable to catch up on progress and share advice and support.

As PEARL is being launched, the strategy has highlighted that there are many stakeholder groups and activities that need to be covered. Future work will involve planning the workshops to be held at UoP in Spring 2011 and collaborating with Symplectic around the training materials that will be needed.
Nicola Cockarill
Senior Subject Librarian, University of Plymouth

What data can Research Management Systems and Repositories exchange for mutual benefit?

We're thinking about our stakeholder groups and how and when to target them about the Symplectic to repository connector. Understanding how users interact with a CRIS or similar (in this case Symplectic but could be other platforms) may help target advocacy materials more effectively. From the CRIS it would good to profile:

• what proportion of content is deposited or approved/declined by authors and what proportion is deposited/approved/declined by delegates (ie someone "impersonating" the author)?
• usage patterns over time, by department - do some departments interact regularly whilst others batch up work to deal with once or twice a year?
• what proportion of staff in a department have logged in to the CRIS - ever/in the last six months/this month? Are there many known "non-users"?
• proportion of research outputs in a department which have been "harvested" automatically and which have been added manually

What data would a CRIS be looking for from a repository? Perhaps download statistics could be fed back for incorporation in CRIS reports or displayed as part of the author's publication list - ideally not just downloads but some geographical and domain data as well.
Would it be interesting to compare the journal impact factor - often included in a CRIS - with individual paper hits and downloads?

Are there other areas of data exchange that would help improve the service we offer to depositors?

Update from Exeter

We have had a very constructive set of discussions within the local project team in Exeter and have made substantial progress towards our advocacy plan. Two documents form the foundation for this work:

• the communications and key messages plan that was used during the initial rollout of Symplectic in 2009
• a newer breakdown of key stakeholders, message types and appropriate delivery vehicles, that reflects the changed organisational structure introduced this year

Going forward, we will be merging elements of these two documents, as well as identifying key individuals and dates. In addition we are reviewing the recently revised governance structure of the University, to identify appropriate communication routes.

Other work has concentrated on identifying the best time for the rollout of Repository Tools, and the best months within which to run the workshops. This has involved clarifying the dates of other internal processes (such as the internal research monitoring exercise) and ensuring that the various activities do not clash.

Two further local meetings are scheduled, within which we intend to finalise our advocacy plan in time for the deadline at the end of November.

Project team communications

One of the challenging aspects of collaborating on the RePosit project is the geography involved - literally the distances between our five partner Higher Education Institutions: Exeter and Plymouth in the south-west of the country; Leeds and Keele in the north; and Queen Mary and commercial partner Symplectic Ltd based in London. Without the resources for more regular project meetings in person, but with an urgent need to collaborate now that we're into the phase of the project when the various partners are working on real plans for their HEIs and we are drawing up real advocacy materials, we've decided to use a technical solution - the conference call. And so next week sees our first RePosit project Skype conference call, on Thursday 11th November.


Posted by: Lizzie Dipple

RePosit at Research Libraries UK conference

This year's Research Libraries UK conference, themed around 'Innovation in a Time of Financial Challenge', is taking place in Edinburgh from 10th to 12th November - and RePosit will be there. There is a section of the conference for Pecha Kucha talks on 'Innovation in Our Libraries' and project director Bo Middleton will be giving a presentation in this slot to introduce the ideas behind RePosit to the UK research libraries community. Through this exposure, we hope to increase the number and range of people following our project progress on this blog, gain more members for our user community Google group, and get valuable feedback along the way.


posted by: Lizzie Dipple

Conversation with Pablo de Castro

I had a very interesting conversation with Pablo de Castro about the Sonex initiative last Wednesday (6th October 2010). Our discussion centred around crossover in research between our two projects into ways of depositing into repositories from other information sources, and this how model of deposit could be used as an advocacy tool.

Pablo and I discussed whether we might approach advocacy in different ways, not just in the context of a specific audience but also to the content itself; for example, would the emphasis of any advocacy materials need to be different if all publications data were to be deposited into a repository, including metadata-only records, as opposed to full text only?

We discussed the slow uptake of deposit to repositories in Spain, and how it was hoped that initiatives and projects like ours might help to engage more researchers and demonstrate the benefits of repositories, and the ease with which content can be deposited using different sources to automate and facilitate metadata creation and file upload.

We also talked at the new BioMed Central Automated Article-Deposit feed which uses the SWORD protocol to deposit content automatically into institutional repositories from BioMed Central, increasing deposit to compliant repositories, and decreasing workload for repository staff.

For me, this was particularly interesting because it threw up questions about whether this model would work with our own deposit model. Could these models be made to work together, and indeed should they? Thoughts?

It was a fascinating conversation, serving to highlight for me how the same issues around engagement are repeated, regardless of country. A big thanks to Pablo for taking the time to speak to me, before heading off to the 10th Rebiun Workshop (for those of you able to read Spanish!). It was a real pleasure.

Sarah Molloy (Queen Mary, University of London)

2nd Project team meeting minutes

Herewith the full minutes from the second RePosit project team meeting, held on Monday 13th September at the University of Exeter. We had a lot to cover and it was quite an intense session, so there is plenty to read about.

In brief:
After a quick project progress update, we did an in-depth review of the lessons our project could learn from reading documentation on the various JISC projects that had done work in similar or related areas (individual review resumes are posted in this blog tagged with #Literature review). These lessons included: tailor/target advocacy, demonstrate usability, combined advocacy (one 'team' message), don't use jargon, embed in the work life-cycle, continual reminders and in as many ways as possible, be aware of cultural differences/barriers.

We spent some time working out how to approach advocacy strategies, whether via the message itself (key benefits), which audience it would be aimed at (e.g. senior managers, librarians, academics - all of whom might be engaged or not), how it would be delivered (e.g. passive info, one-to-ones, training sessions), and decided that each HEI being at a different stage would need to pull together these different strands in different ways to produce different strategies, such as blanket awareness-raising, using champions or targeting early career academics. Having outlined the grid of possibilities, we fleshed out some key sample strategies for an institution just starting out with a brand-new repository, such as Keele's situation. The content of advocacy materials really relates to which points from a full list of benefits/requirements is specifically applicable to whichever group you are targeting. Therefore we spent some time working out our master list of messages. To finish off, we had a brief review of what and when our training events should be, how we will produce the necessary accompanying materials, some thoughts for the user survey, a look at possible events next year we can piggy-back on to for dissemination purposes and a review of all the many actions we now have to complete!


posted by: Lizzie Dipple

Next full project team meeting - January in Leeds

The date of the next RePosit full project team meeting has been set for 13th/14th January 2011 and this meeting will take place in Leeds.

Lizzie Dipple

Meeting with JISC programme managers

Last week was quite a week for meetings in the RePosit project. In addition to Monday's full team project meeting in Exeter, on Wednesday 15th September Richard Jones, Bo Middleton (project director) and I met with David Flanders and Balviar Notay from JISC, which is the key funder of this project.

David and Balviar explained where RePosit sits within the JISCdepo ('Deposit of research outputs') strand of the Information Environment Programme of projects. The three main areas in JISCdepo are: projects related to tools for deposit (our CRIS system-based project fits in here), projects around infrastructure (such as the SWORD standard) and projects collecting use cases (SONEX). Discussing RePosit in more detail, we looked at what our project aims to achieve and what the outputs will be, and we had fantastic feedback on what form these could take to be most useful to the wider JISC deposit community. The project partner HEIs are each at different stages along the path of repository and publications management system set-up, advocacy, training and use - and the intention is that these different stages will be mirrored in the 'packs' of training and advocacy materials and plans that are produced during RePosit. Some HEIs (often the smallest) are at the starting point, having had neither a repository nor the link between it and a publications management system before at all; some have a repository and a limited number or scope of deposits but really need to re-brand and start advocacy and training almost from scratch with certain sectors; and some HEIs have a large, established repository and have done previous advocacy but want to review and update as well as taking on board the new means of deposit via the CRIS publications management system link.

We also looked at how we hope to develop our user community space into an open forum for sharing advocacy through the project's life and even beyond, and how we could perhaps link in to the RSP (Repositories Support Project) to aid the wider dissemination of training and materials.

All in all, a productive and informative discussion.


posted by: Lizzie Dipple (project manager)

New team photo

It seems that the team photo taken at our first project meeting held in July at Queen Mary, University of London wasn't very popular in some quarters. So at lunchtime during our recent project meeting held at the University of Exeter we nipped outside and took a new one.



standing (left to right): Ellie James (Keele), Nicola Cockarill (Plymouth), Ian Tilsed (Exeter), Rachel Proudfoot (Leeds), Sarah Molloy (QMUL), Jill Evans (Exeter)
seated (left to right): Jodie Double (Leeds), Bo Middleton (Leeds), Lizzie Dipple (Symplectic), Richard Jones (Sympletic)


posted by: Lizzie Dipple