Post1: RepositoryMan

RepositoryMan is the blog of Les Carr, a researcher and lecturer in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University if Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, UK. His area of research, for the purposes of this blog is e-research, and specifically how researchers use the repository he manages. As of 2007 this repository contained “about 10,000 records and gets about 600 new deposits per year. There are 2400 papers published since 2004, of which 1400 have open access full texts,” its serves as the “bibliographic record of all school output” (post “Some Background,” 10 July 2007). This repository meets the criteria of digital curation as it in breadth: it attempts to collect all the published material of the school’s faculty and utilizes tools. The repository creates a bibliography of the institution’s work, and is an important tool for academic networking (keep track of citations, sharing your research via social networking). Furthermore, Carr explains the value of the repository to the faculty in terms of how they might utilize other tools with the repository to describe their work (using cites like dipity.com to create a timeline of an individual’s publications) so that a depositor does not feel like placing their work into the repository is equivalent to a dead end.

Likewise Carr uses visualization tools to inform the research and faculty community about what is contained in the repository and how it works. When a New Head of School was hired, Carr created a 'thumbnail wall' of all the files stored in" the repository that he could print in poster format to emphasize the importance of the repository.

Furthermore, one of the most interesting entries on Carr’s blog was a recent posting titled "Institutional Visualization" 2 July 2009, wherein Carr uses tools to show “the spread of research on a particular topic across the institution.”