The first year of development (May 2005- April 2006) was seen as a pilot
project when members of the IR Steering Committee worked closely with different
stakeholders throughout the University to raise interest and gain support for the
development of this new service. A librarian’s guide to IRs was written by staff at
Loughborough (Barwick and Pickton, 2006) and this is available via the IR. By late
2006 the repository contained over 2000 items, including published articles, theses,
pre-prints and conference papers and is being indexed by Google, Google Scholar and
the Open Archive Initiative harvester and search engine, OAIster. OAIster
(http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/) is hosted by the University of Michigan and
contains almost 10 million records from IRs in over 700 institutions. Loughborough
is also registered on the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR at
http://www.opendoar.org/) which is hosted by the University of Nottingham and
Lund University, and the Register of Open Access Repositories (ROAR at
http://archives.eprints.org/) which is hosted by the University of Southampton. As
evidenced by the entries in these directories many other institutions are involved in
setting up IRs. For example, Simpson and Hey (2006) describe developments at
Southampton University, Jones and Andrew (2005) outline the work in developing the
4
Edinburgh Research Archive and Bevan (2005) describes the collection of e-theses
at Cranfield University.