NISO, the National Information Standards Organisation have just posted the presentations from their recent one-day repository workshop; Getting the Most Out of Your Institutional Repository: Gathering Content and Building Use. Although I haven’t, as yet, had time to look through it all, it looked to have been an interesting day, discussing many of the issues faced by repository managers and librarians. 

Many of the issues raised are nothing new: not enough time, not enough understanding, too many ideas, an ever shifting platform on which to try and build policies, and lack of faculty support. If you’ve been at one of the UKCORR meetings, you’ll be aware that almost everyone is jumping in and out of the same boat. So the irony of asking you to take some additional time out of an already busy day to read a bunch of presentations on attitudes and changes within the world of IRs is not lost on me.

However, if you do get a spare moment, then it is worth dipping in to. John Erickson’s presentation on a web 2.0 vision of DSpace should be of particular interest to you all in regards to potential futures, and Dorothea Salo’s analysis of the issues faced when setting up a repository, should illustrate many of the ways in which a hosted solution like Open Repository can ease some of the pain. Other presentations cover issues of stewardship, theses and Object Re-Use & Exchange (ORE), which you might consider to be the next generation of OAI-PMH.

So even though it’s clear the battle between the technological under-pinnings of repository working and user acceptance is still far from being won, it’s good to see that everyone’s beginning to move in the right direction.