the repository was indeed a person - the programmer who had to remember the location of all information to a software project, who had to recall information that was never written down and reconstruct information that had been lost. Sadly,using a person as "the center for accumulation and storage"(although it conforms to Webster's definition)does not work very well. Today,the repository is a "thing" a database that acts as the center for both accumlation and storage of sofware engineering information. The role of the person (the software engineer) is to interact with the repository using tools that are integrated with it.