Open Repositories 2012: an international gathering

In July 2012 the University of Edinburgh hosted the Seventh International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2012).
Open Repositories is an annual gathering, bringing together those responsible for the development, implementation and management of digital repositories together with stakeholders to address theoretical, practical, and strategic issues across the entire lifecycle of research information, from the creation and management of digital content, to enabling use, re-use, and interconnection of information, and ensuring long-term preservation and archiving.

The theme and title of this year’s event – Open Services for Open Content: Local In for Global Out – reflected the current move towards open content, “augmented content”, distributed systems and data delivery infrastructures. The conference opened with a number of varied and well-attended workshops. This was followed by over 40 plenary sessions in the two main conference strands enjoyed by more than 460 delegates from over 40 countries, a developer challenge organised by DevCSI, and Repository User Group sessions at the end of the week. For this year only, a third “Repository Fringe” strand was introduced, based on the successful “Repository Fringe” event hosted at the University of Edinburgh in recent years. This included a wide range of Pecha Kucha presentations which were lively and offered an “unconference” space for OR2012 delegates to set the agenda and promote discussion on nominated themes.

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. EDINA highlights included a discussion about UK RepositoryNet+ (OR2012 sponsor), the Repositories Support Project: Building a National Network workshop as part of wider discussions on the recent JISC-funded activities in this area. The UK RepositoryNet+ team also 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 a paper from Andrew Dorward, Peter Burnhill and Terry Sloan (all EDINA), “The Development of a socio-technical infrastructure to support open access publishing through institutional repositories”.
EDINA Director Peter Burnhill closed the conference with a well-received summary of key themes and discussions.

Formal conference activity was complemented by outreach across multiple social media platforms that triggered much activity including a storify for #OR2012, a Google Doc with a capture of the nearly 5,000 tweets, and over 500 photographs on Flickr. Presentations, videos and other conference artefacts are available on the OR2012 website.