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)