When Irish IRs are Smiling

22 January 2008

Belfast event for the RSP

Chris Yates kicked off this RSP Professional Briefing, welcoming the delegates to a pretty, if soggy, Belfast and introducing the RSP and what it can do for you.

Pete Cliff then gave a revised Making Effective Use of Your Repository
talk, suggesting that repositories should not exist in isolation but rather should form part of a Web information environment and also integrate with institutional management systems. He also suggested that the first step for repository managers is to specify what the repository is, taking a step back, and that this was useful to define how the repository might fit in these contexts.

Continuing at relentless pace, Chris then took over to facilitate a empathy workshop, encouraging the delegates to imagine themselves in the roles of repository stakeholders - Publishers, Repository Managers and Academics. Always a good opportunity for a lively debate, this workshop was no exception.

"Really interesting & enjoyable. I learned a lot."

"A very interesting and informative day."

The briefing then paused for refreshments, once again encouraging the delegates to discuss repository issues between themselves and with RSP staff. No RSP event would be complete without speed networking, with Pete Cliff facilitating. While useful to encourage communication, this was perhaps less well received at this event due to the skew in attendence, with half the delegates from a single institution.

At last, it was time for a well earned break and some lunch.

After lunch, Steph Taylor led the group through some of the tricker issues of Copyright and IPR, highlighting some of the commonly overlooked problems in a very useful presentation, followed by a workshop aimmed at encouraging delegates to consider some difficult (and sometimes delicate) deposition scenarios. Suffice to say it soon became clear that copyright was both a big problem, but also one with no clear rules or answers - almost every situation that might arise having to be dealt with on its own merit. That said, as Steph suggested, policies and guidelines were very helpful.

Steph's workshop brought another successful RSP event to a close. There were requests to revisit Belfast in a year to see how the repositories had progressed and so we look forward to returning to Northern Ireland then if not before!

Slides from this event are now available. For information on future RSP events contact support@rsp.ac.uk