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