JISC

Fred Friend gave a presentation which looked at the political and practical background to mandates and policies in this area.  The point was raised that authors see no immediate benefit to archiving and so do not archive their work.  However, since the system will only work with a high percentage of deposition, we do need some additional mechanism to get over the first step.  Mandates for deposition are one such mechanism.  Although they have been the subject of much discussion there are still only a very small number of institutional mandates.  In addition, it is also unclear as to how these mandates are enforced within each institution.

The presentation went on to a look at a list of advocacy tasks which need to be addressed.  It was noted that the support of UUK, as evidenced through the presentation at the conference of Professor Drummond Bone, would be of great assistance in advocacy work.

Gerard van Westrienan reviewed the very successful DARE project in the Netherlands.  The presentation clearly showed the advantages of a fully coordinated national approach to the installation and population of repositories.  The talk reviewed the success of the Cream of Science initiative in populating repositories and in engaging academics.  The success of this initiative in achieving large numbers of holdings , including 59% of full text materials, was partially helped by Dutch copyright law which allowed the automatic collection and use of materials in an electronic form dating before 1997.

Particular advantages of a coordinated national initiative were singled out, including a unified approach to metadata; marketing and communication; the involvement of scholars; a unified approach to copyright; and of course the building of the institutional repository infrastructure.

Les Carr looked at the work which has been done within the University of Southampton on the establishment and growth of their own institutional repositories. The repository itself was built on a successful institutional bibliographic database started in 1998.  The use of this database was already mandated, and so the issue of a repository mandate in 2003 for the deposition of full text material, wherever possible, built on an existing institutional initiative. 

The presentation looked at the changing drivers of the repository over the years and the consequent effects  that these have had to have on collection policy.  These ranged from a full text collection policy to begin with, through accepting metadata-only submissions in support of RAE work, and now subsequent work to increase the number of full text entries given that the metadata itself has been stored.

Discussion: Discussion covered the staffing requirement for the work in Southampton (0.5 FTE as a dedicated post, with an additional  2 FTE derived from previously embedded staff: RAE work additional to this).

Further discussion covered some of the additional issues faced when a repository also accepts learning objects.  The Dutch experience was that learning objects are an additional and significantly different class of repository object.  The possible benefits of an informal approach to sharing learning objects were discussed, as opposed to the formal licensing environment necessary with formal repository holdings.