NIRDs Unite: Building a Community of Institutional Repository Practitioners in the Northeast

"In the northeastern United States, there is a noticeable lack of any organized regional events specifically related to the topic of IRs. With other regions across the country holding similar events — along with recent national discussions and projects proposing a move away from local repositories (Coalition of Networked Information [CNI], 2017; Weinraub, Alagna, Caizzi, Quinn, & Schaefer, 2018) — starting a regional community of practice could prove beneficial in the long-term for repository managers and their institutions. Repository managers have a vested interest in the ongoing success of the repositories they manage; have genuine policy, copyright, and self-archiving concerns; and have developed robust workflows to manage their IRs’ unique content and needs. At the end of the day, how do we communicate the value of the work we do to external stakeholders, our broader institution, and library administration? The idea for “Northeast Institutional Repository Day” (NIRD) was conceived by a group of five repository librarians in the northeast. The organizers sent out a pre-conference online survey to the IR community in November 2018 to see if fellow repository practitioners had an interest in attending and/or participating in such a day and the response was a resounding, “Yes!” The survey results suggested that building a stronger regional network of repository managers would foster meaningful discussions on the merits and effectiveness of IRs...."