These initial meetings gave us an insight into how best to approach other departments.
Different disciplines have very different workflows and attitudes to the research
process and it became very clear that the departments would have their own views of
what and how they wanted to use the service: part of the success of the repository has
been our ability to be responsive to these differences. Working with these volunteer
departments helped us solve the ‘chicken and egg’ problem: in the period June 2005 –
January 2006, we had amassed approximately 600 items which we could use in
demonstrations to new stakeholders. It also gave us an opportunity to test the
software and our policies before widening the service to other departments in the
University.