In this hands-on learning programme a team from Murdoch Library helps you explore free online tools that can be used for teaching, learning, research and managing daily work. It runs from 23 June to 28 July 2009. Each Friday information about two or three Things , plus exercises about each will appear on this blog. You can complete all of this from home, or if you booked in you can attend workshops offered by the library.

I think that there is a gap in the market in the Australian Repository scene; I think a lot of sites would be interested in services and/or hosting around a completely open source software stack. In this post I will outline the kinds of services I think might be attractive, how they might be provisioned, which bits of software I think would be suitable.

Institutional repositories (IR) are tools to support, disseminate, and showcase the scholarly communications and intellectual life of an institution. A successful repository requires planning and a defined focus, as well as an attractive name and design. To achieve success, the IR must serve faculty on faculty's terms; the librarian's role is to collaborate with faculty and ensure that the services of the IR meet faculty needs. Foster, Bankier, and Wiley offered strategies for success drawn from their work creating successful institutional repositories.

On April 23, 2009, the University Senate at the University of Maryland voted 37-24 to reject a proposed OA policy. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/04/faculty-votes-against-oa-policy-at.html The defeated policy would have encouraged green OA (deposit in the institutional repository), encouraged gold OA (submission to OA journals), and required neither. Is the Maryland vote ominous or anomalous? Either way, supporters of OA should try to understand it. Whatever its causes, they could arise again elsewhere. At the same time, we should understand why many stronger OA policies have been accepted at other campuses.