I had an opportunity to participate in the 4th International Conference on Open Repositories during the week of May 18th - 21st in Atlanta, Georgia. It was great to meet the people who we've been working, talking and sharing with over Skype and email this past while and to see all of the innovative projects that are happening in this space.

There was considerable buzz about Islandora and it was featured in several poster presentations during the conference. You can see some of the islandora buzz by having a look at the #OR09 twitter feed during the conference.

Here's a brief summary of some of the sessions I attended.

Subject Based Repositories

Two subject based repositories where presented during this session. Both focused on the subject of economics, but they had different approaches to repository content and models.

Robertson Library could easily build on the IslandScholar model to offer a valuable specialized subject-based repository service to our users. Benefits to scholars and other users include a central portal for performing subject related academic searches, increased visibility of high quality (Grey) Literature, and access to the fulltext of documents. The Ivy Academic Search for Veterinary Science and Medicine [http://www.ivyacademicsearch.org/index.php] is an interesting example that includes metadata harvested from a number of different institutional and open access repositories.

Promoting/Marketing Repositories

I enjoyed Wayne Johnston's presentation on naming and branding of institutional repositories from a social marketing perspective. He discussed how institutions could use techniques from the social marketing realm (eg. health promotion, improve the environment)  to help change behavior as it relates to institutional repositories (IR) ... the move to open access, deposit of research in IRs, IRs in the scholarly workflow. He mentioned how important is was to steer away from the IR term - passive / weak - to something more dynamic. He provided examples (both names and branding) from the Canadian context ... some examples included:

• Cream of Science (faculty pubs in IR) and Promise of Science (graduate pubs in the IR) [Dutch ... not Canadian]
• OPUS
• ROSE
• Ozone
• IslandScholar
• WinSpace
• Spectrum

Branding could include aspirational imagery, cobranding, or social models (persons engaging in the behavior ... think READ posters). He discussed different promotions ... and talked about the IslandScholar launch as an example of a great promotion ... and mentioned others like brochures, web content, articles in campus newsletters/newspapers, incentives, and seeding the repository (like IslandScholar).  He felt that liaison librarians / one-on-one had been most successful promotion strategy at his institution.

Elizabeth Yakel discussed success factors for IRs based on her work with case studies. IR were more than just 'repositories' for institutions ... for the library it represented an opportunity to engage faculty in the scholarly workflow. IR were not just repositories ... they provide additional services like managing author rights, providing a publication platform, a method for faculty to track their scholarly production. IRs provided citations, another point of access for faculty work (and a method for providing impact factoring), and perservation of their work. IRs are the entry for libraries into the world of data curation or co-curation.

IRs were often 'branded' outside of the library domain and given their own look and feel so that it stood on its own.

More to come ...

Object Re-use and Exchange (ORE)

Repository Solutions

Islandora, OpenVault, Agile Fedora