JISC Repository Deposit Programme Meeting - 1st March

Last week RePosit was represented at the JISC Repository Deposit Programme meeting in Birmingham. Under the supervision of Balvair Notay, JISC manager for the Deposit projects, the following projects provided updates on their progress:

• DepositMO
• DURA
• Kultivate
• Open Access Repository Repository Junction (OA-RJ)
• Sword v2
• Sonex

As well as providing an opportunity for the projects to learn more about the work of each other, we were all also asked to explore three key questions and to report back, both at the meeting and via blog posts. So, below, are the three points, and my thoughts on them for RePosit!

What actions are required for the success of your project? What are the indicators?

These are based around the core deliverable of advocacy, ensuring the right level of engagement, to the right audience at the right time - moving from the planning of advocacy to the actual delivery and the use of materials developed so far. The delivery of the technical solutions for each partner institution also remains key. The indicators would be increased deposit and a correlation with the release of the embedded deposit tool. More broadly, an increased understanding of deposit, and the reasons for it, would also be an indicator of success.

What strategies are required to spread good practice?

Our strategies include the provision of advovacy materials (including institutional strategies), engagement with other projects and organisations (such as Kultivate and RSP), the provision of this very blog and ongoing testing and evaluation of project outputs.

How are you going to feed data for the evaluation?

RePosit is perhaps fortunate among the projects in that it can gather quantitative data via the monthly repository statistics collection, and can monitor this in relation to the release of embedded deposit tools, and the effect this may have on deposits. However, it is also important to collect qualitative data, via surveys and other similar activity, as a change of culture, of mindset, among academics is also an important output. The project will also make the data available to Evidence Base.

In summary, the programme meeting provided an excellent opportunity to meet the other projects, share good practice and mull over common issues.

For my part, I managed to avoid being photographed, but no such luck for Richard! He can be seen assisting Kultivate with their afternoon report in a very informative blog from the SONEX project.

Posted by: Ian Tilsed