The GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign just released a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation report on their one-year pilot investigating advances in institutional repository (IR) development to learn about successes and challenges experienced by IR initiatives at university libraries that had made a substantial commitment to developing and sustaining an IR.
Key findings include:
- Approaches to IR development could be broken into 3 categories: problem-solving, collaboration and intellectual property (IP) management
- Core competencies for IR team members included:
- Understanding the intricacies and scope of scholarly communication and IP issues
- Understanding the disciplinary differences in research practices
- Possession of key technical, outreach, coordination and collaboration skills
- Content acquisition was far from routine and unevenly paced
- Enthusiastic adopters of the IR included faculty who found that the IR could solve particular information problems
