[[RESEND: I accidentally mailed this response just to Joanne, when I meant to reply to the list as well.]]

On 17 Jan 2006, at 10:26, Joanne Yeomans wrote:

Arthur,
At CERN our repository contains much more than just research articles, theses and preprints. We add into it our management minutes, financial tender documents, photos, posters and internal bulletin articles, videos of lectures and much more. It would appear that the more our researchers rely on our repository to find all sorts of material that might be interesting or useful to them, the more likely they are to realise they should deposit their papers there too.
 
I can't think why this is such an absurd idea...
One can't argue with success (although one can wonder how to replicate it), and so I would like to find out how you have come to this result.

It's certainly easy to extend a digital repository to accept all the material that you want to deposit (from a policy and data handling perspective). But different types of material may well come with different usage requirements - for example image manipulation, efficient video streaming or issue tracking through committee minutes.

Can I ask how CERN uses its repository - have you adapted the software to provide all the administrative, teaching and marketing functions that could be asked of the stored documents, or have you restricted the user requirements such that the repository is simply a repository - a storage bank for all CERN's digital documents?


--
Les Carr