Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Usability Development

This study shares the results of an effort to understand the needs and goals of future institutional repository (IR) users at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB). Due to underutilization of IRs at other institutions, the University Libraries at UCB decided it was imperative that insight into users' goals and needs of an IR be gained before design of the repository began. The libraries partnered with faculty and students with expertise in human-computer interaction to study user needs. The results of this study yielded "personas" describing different classes of potential IR users on university campuses, which can be used to guide IR architects in designing repositories that facilitate increased participation.

"If institutional repositories (IRs) were all that their proponents could have hoped, they would be providing researchers with better access to research, improving institutional prestige, and assisting with formal research assessment [The reality, though, is that IRs are less frequently implemented, harder to fill, and less visible than their advocates would hope or expect.

While technical platforms for IRs, such as DSpace and ePrints have seen an abundance of research, little is known about the users of IRs, neither how they use IR software, nor how usable it is for them. IR users can be divided into three main groups: authors, information seekers, and data creators/maintainers; while authors are reasonably well understood, the latter groups are particularly under-studied."