We derive lessons from the migration of our institutional repository from BePress to Preservica, specifically looking at the parts of the endeavor that were unnecessary, onerous, unreasonable and otherwise presented extra institutional and emotional labor for us as librarians. We transmute these lessons into utopian possibilities for how interactions with vendors, institutional partners, and stakeholders could go. We imagine a context in which institutional data had its own set of rights and standards not just for preservation but for transmission and usability between platforms in the event of a vendor change. We imagine the potential for institutions, whose data create the necessity for preservation and access platforms, to be able to advocate through cooperation and solidarity against vendor-created obstacles and lack of care. We provide examples of the problems we encountered (e.g. reclaiming data, dealing with third party storage, connecting vendors to institutional IT) and how they present an opportunity to reimagine relationships with vendors and the data itself.

Wikidata is an emerging resource and presents a new model for conducting scholarship. It provides an opportunity for repositories to expand their capabilities and for their staff to get hands-on experience with linked open data. This topic is important as I believe that Wikidata is not currently well understood as a concept or how it can be used by repositories in a practical, real world manner. This presentation will discuss enhancing institutional repositories with Wikidata, focusing on how it can be an extra layer of discovery. It will highlight how Wikidata can improve the discoverability, findability, and searchability of repositories, offering innovative ways to increase their visibility. The presentation will demonstrate how institutional repositories can achieve global reach, by leveraging linked data structures to maximize their impact for institutions, creators, and users alike. This session will be an invaluable chance for in person discussion and dialogue amongst individuals already using Wikidata in their repositories and librarians who are not familiar with or do not have experience in Wikidata or linked data principles. This will empower repositories to start projects on their own and to make a difference for both their users and the world through their work on Wikidata.

Cambridge University Library (CUL) is currently undertaking a pilot project to engage with Cambridge researchers wishing to publish their research in non-traditional journals. The project seeks to provide greater discoverability and availability of content by implementing suitable infrastructure, built on interoperable, open, and widely adopted platforms.

During the first year we have implemented and launched the journal hosting platform, which is available at https://diamond-oa.lib.cam.ac.uk. It is based on DSpace, a widely adopted, open-source repository platform. This choice allows us to explore alternative publishing and review models, currently unavailable in more traditional journal publishing platforms. We are working very closely with our pilot participants to assess submission and editorial management workflows, as well as determining content structuring and journal pages design needs and gathering feedback from the journals. These are key activities that allow us, jointly with our participating journals, to determine the suitability of DSpace as a journal publishing platform. So far, feedback from participants has been very positive and they are finding the platform and publishing processes intuitive and easy to use.

This presentation will provide an overview of the pilot, lessons learned so far and describe next steps and future areas for development as we transition into service.

Institutional repositories face two types of accessibility concerns. The first is the accessibility of the repository architecture as a system to navigate. The second issue is the accessibility of the repository's content. For the latter, this content is often produced outside of the repository, and repository managers have little ability to control or mitigate accessibility issues before it is deposited. For repositories that include media files, accessibility to the content requires additional steps to create accurate text-based representations of the resource.

Staff from the University of Minnesota’s institutional repository share a brief overview of repository accessibility for users with disabilities, new rules in the United States regarding digital accessibility, as well as the findings of a one-year project to improve their repository’s accessibility through the identification and remediation of high-use inaccessible items.

Dissertations are cornerstones of many repository collections. They are also a source of unique information held by each university. While the dedication and acknowledgements of these papers are often skimmed if they are read at all, they can be a rich source of information. This presentation shares some of the findings from these sections of Montana State University dissertations and suggests future research on the topic. These items, already held by the repository, can offer inspiration for future library services or research across the community. This presentation will outline the motivation, process, and findings from a textual analysis of acknowledgments and dedications of dissertations from one institution.

In our work on establishing and growing the Thoth Archiving Network, we have learned several lessons around the challenges in working with university systems, repository software versions, and the labyrinthine strands of metadata customisations that occur within repositories. Differing metadata schemas can be uniquely customized within one institution who has implemented an instance of open-source repository software, differently to another institution on the network with the same software. Issues with institutional repositories and a sustainable network are not limited to security, metadata, and software versioning, however. More high-level concerns, some administrative, are also in play. These include the level of volatility that exists within HE institutions and the brevity of contracts between universities and repository software providers. We still believe there is a benefit to involving institutional repositories around the world in helping to archive and preserve at-risk scholarly knowledge in the form of open access monographs, but we recognise the barriers that exist, in physical, technical, and contractual components, which would need to be well-considered going forward, for the benefit of both the Network and the involved institutions. Surely solutions are possible, through cooperation and collaboration. In this talk we hope to move forward the conversation.

In its Dataverse-based institutional repository, KU Leuven has a review phase for each dataset before publication to support researchers in publishing their data in a FAIR way. To streamline our curation workflow and free up as much time as possible for support, we have developed a review dashboard to track who reviews what. The dashboard plugs in to our Dataverse instance and automates part of the review process with a general checklist and automated feedback generation in addition to easily assigning and following up on dataset reviews. With the review dashboard, we aim to support human curation through automation and not replace it. This also means exploring automation options by building in automated checks.

We’ll share our road to the creation of the review dashboard and the work we are currently doing to further the implementation of curation supported by automated checks. We’ll show the UI-side, but also provide a look into the logic of the automated checks. We hope to spark conversation on how to further support the human task of curation through tools and technology without losing the important human touch and interpretation that is so valuable to making a dataset as FAIR as possible.