Secondment | thelibrarianerrant

"I’ve spent the past two months on secondment at the university’s Office of Scholarly Communication, working two days a week as a repository assistant, uploading research outputs of researchers at the University of Cambridge to the university’s repository, Apollo. This involved editing the metadata of the uploaded articles, conference papers and other outputs, and ensuring that the uploaded files both fulfilled funder requirements for open access and complied with the copyright agreements the researchers had signed with their respective publishers. By a lucky coincidence, my secondment coincided with the announcement that Stephen Hawking had made his PhD thesis available on the repository, an announcement that subsequently caused the repository to crash for several days. So not only did I get to learn some valuable new skills, I also got to be in the room where it happened during a significant moment in the history of open access research at Cambridge."