Lincoln Academic Commons

Just six months ago, we noted that we’d reached a milestone with the deposit of over 1000 items in the repository. Today, we can see from the graph below, that we’ve doubled this figure, thanks to the work of Rosaline, Bev and Jill in the Library, who are tireless advocates for the repository among academic staff and keen cataloguers, too. Each faculty now has a representative on the repository Steering Group and from September, all staff are required to deposit their research in the repository. It’s worth noting that the repository began its life as a JISC-funded project which ended in April 2008. You can see from the graph that in our case, the end of the project marked the start of its use, taking a further year to really take off. People, processes, committees, approvals, allocation of time and money were all factors in the quiet period of 08/09 but once agreed, confirmed and in place, deposits have sky-rocketed. It will be interesting to see at what point deposits slow to something more sustainable after this initial burst, as can be seen from the activity around Leicester’s repository, for example.

A snapshot of the rate of deposits 29/07/2010

This image was created by ROAR, The Registry of Open Access Repositories