The academic librarians have played a crucial part in helping us to say the ‘right
things’ and to direct presentations to individual groups but the response of academics
to the IR has still varied from department to department. In fact, reactions have
varied greatly within departments too. Some are very enthusiastic; some hostile;
others merely sceptical or indifferent. There is often concern that this is another
administrative demand on their already limited time and there is never a ‘good time’
to approach people: the demands on academics seem to be constant. At present, we
are not asking academics to self-archive and all the work is being carried out within
the library. It was hoped this approach, also used for the development of our Reading
List System, would encourage them to participate more freely and seems to have been
effective in many cases. Some departments were facing internal decisions about how
to manage their publications and offering them the repository as a solution has been
met with enthusiasm. This is the main reason why we have been flexible in our
acceptance of different material: we have worked closely with departments, listening
to what they want from the service and have developed their collections in relation to
this. Over the course of this first year, we gathered over 1800 items and Figure 5
shows the growth of the IR during this period. From July 2005 –January 2006, it
shows steady growth as we worked with our ‘early adopters’: the period from
February 2006 onwards, and the steep increase, correlates to the phase at which we
widened the service to other departments. There are a growing number of different
types of material which includes pre-prints; working papers; published articles;
conference papers and theses.