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