Access 2016

Maybe it goes without saying, but building an institutional repository from scratch requires a tremendous amount of effort. There's upper-level project management, institution-wide organizational concerns, extensive content recruitment, back-end technical requirements, workflow creation, quality assurance challenges, astounding potential for custom development, political struggles, copyright hurdles, policy creation, bug squashing, records management and digital preservation concerns... and these concerns likely barely scratch the surface of day-to-day operations. While institutional repository software is developed for the general needs of institutions, institutions themselves are incredibly specific; each school, library, college, university a snowflake in its own right with unique organizational structures, hierarchies, and needs.
Often – out of necessity – it is the job of too few to accommodate these needs. Questions may be answered hastily in the interest of progress. There are faculty and colleagues to account for. Time is short. Expectations are high.
Over two years of development of a new institutional repository at the University of New Brunswick, the myriad challenges of building an institutional repository have become abundantly and repeatedly clear. Unless you've already built a repository at your institution with identical software, you will be embarking on a learning process.
This talk is intended to walk through the challenges and victories over approximately 2 years of extended development and implementation of the UNB Scholar institutional repository at the University of New Brunswick told by the two folks whose hands are the dirtiest, spanning metadata, project-level management, politics, managing expectations, and continued development.