Last week saw months of preparation culminate in Open Repositories 2012, the 7th International Conference on Open Repositories. EDINA staff and services were involved throughout the week-long event not only as co-organisers of the conference but also as session chairs, speakers, participants in Developer Challenge and Repository Fringe strand activities, and workshop leaders.

UK RepositoryNet+ were a sponsor for OR2012 and were present all week. The service was discussed at Monday's Repositories Support Project: Building a National Network workshop as part of wider discussions on the recent work JISC had funded around repositories (captured in this Storify archive). On the Tuesday the UK RepositoryNet+ team led their own workshop showcasing Wave 1 service components and discussing ideas for Wave 2 components. Other activities included a Repository Junction Broker round table and Andrew Dorward, Peter Burnhill and Terry Sloan's paper, "The Development of a socio-technical infrastructure to support open access publishing through institutional repositories". You can read a brief summary of the event on the UK RepositoryNet+ blog and keep an eye out for the new @UKRepNet Twitter account launched specially for OR2012.

EDINA Director Peter Burnhill had been invited to give the closing session giving a well-received summary of the key themes and discussions of the conference, notably the idea that data is now mainstream. You can view the full closing session on YouTube. Peter also co-presented (with Theo Andrew of Edinburgh University Library) a very memorable fairy-themed Pecha Kucha highlighting the work of initiatives including The Keepers Registry and UK LOCKSS in the RepositoryFringe strand on Repository Tools and Approaches. This 6 minute presentation, "E-journal preservation and the archival value of the author's final copy", took the prize for the RF1 Pecha Kucha session.

Project partners were also busy at OR2012 with EDINA projects and services getting honourable mentions in a number of presentations and workshops, such as Beatrice Alex's presentation on the Digging Into Data project, Trading Consequences, for the Working with Text - Tools, Techniques and Approaches for Data Mining Workshop.

The week finished with User Groups, these focus on practical approaches for using particular tools, technologies, and strategies in particular repository softwares or set ups and EDINA was also active in several of these: Anne Roberston, of ShareGeo, spoke at the DSpace Technical Strand on "ShareGeo - encouraging the reuse of derived geospatial data" and Robin Rice, Chair of the DSpace User Group, chaired the final DSpace session on the Friday.

Over 460 delegates attended the event in person and the turnout for the Developer Challenge was the best yet (more details of that on the DevCSI blog). This formal conference activity was complemented by outreach across multiple social media platforms that triggered a flurry of activity including over 4,000 tweets (PDF of tag cloud showing tweet activity), over 500 photos , and dozens of blog posts - such as Natasha Simons' post on data identifiers, a post from the JISC MRD Evidence Gathering blog on research data management, and a post from Nick Shepard of the UK Council of Research Repositories.

The full conference programme now includes links to slides, papers, and related materials.

LiveBlog posts of all parallel sessions can be found on the conference website.

Videos of most sessions, including Cameron Neylon's much-discussed Opening Keynote, are now live on the OR2012 YouTube channel.

And images of the event from organisers and attendees, with those from the poster reception and from the dinner and ceilidh at the National Museum of Scotland particular highlights, are available on Flickr.

All of these resources, plus additional materials around the conference, are in the process of being collated and shared via an Open Repositories repository. This will also incorporate materials from previous Open Repositories events. The repository, as well with further highlights posts, will appear on the Open Repositories 2012 website over the coming weeks.