A return to work after my wonderful 3-week vacation has my brain in project mode, as much as I’m trying to avoid it (there’s so much rote scanning to be done, I’m trying shut my brain off so that I can stand at ScanRobot all day).

Anyways, one of the projects is the institutional repository, ongoing since I started back in August.  We finally now have all policy approved, and are waiting for the technical platform to be finished.  I wrote this up a while ago, before the work group’s idea to use DSPACE was not accepted.  We’re now waiting for an in-house platform to be developed.

It’s an interesting quandary, and one I’d be interested in hearing about at other libraries.  How are you solving this?  Are there other solutions that I don’t see?
____________________________________

Many of the Kazakh faculty and staff are publishing in local print journals that are not indexed anywhere online.  This causes a problem in keeping comprehensive records of publications, because of the time and effort that would be involved in locating all of these sorts of publications (we would have to identify all of the local journals in which these people might publish, have one of the local staff members manually go through each journal edition looking for familiar names or affiliation, and write these down).

  After heavy thought and collaboration with the Central Research Office, we decided that the most agreeable solution would be to develop a self-archiving system.  In order to be effective, this system would have to both add value to our record-keeping (be accurate enough) and to the faculty or staff member themselves.  By offering a service that would allow the faculty or staff member to keep track of their publications in a way that they could easily generate a list for a grant proposal or CV, we could solve our own problem.