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