Institutional repositories (IRs) have many variations in their set up and operation, resulting in metadata workflows that are often complex, heterogeneous and insufficiently documented. Differences include technical providers and platforms, internal and external sources of metadata and how these are captured (including the relationship to CRIS systems), and the extent to which metadata are exposed for download and harvesting.

To demonstrate current variability in approaches, and provide a framework to identify where improvements could be made in the use and availability of open research information in repositories, a working group of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information designed a survey to identify a set of typical repository workflows.

The survey aims to gather comparable, high-level information about how IRs collect, manage, and expose research information, from a workflow perspective.It asks about the repository’s scope and content, how and from which sources information is collected, and how metadata are made available to others (including interfaces provided, data formats and licensing).

We will discuss Initial survey results (representing a variety of repositories, institutions and countries) and demonstrate how visualizing repository metadata workflows can be valuable for identifying shared patterns, recurring pain points, and approaches to address these.

NYU Libraries provides its researchers with a range of individual repositories and related services; in the coming years we plan to merge and align these services as much as possible. To fully understand the challenges, and refine our requirements and solutions, we’ve engaged in a robust service design project. This presentation will describe the application of service design principles to the migration and relaunch of our university’s repository services.

For the past two years, a group of diverse specialists has been meeting weekly. For the first year, our charge was discovery – charting the multidimensional journeys of current workflows and identifying opportunities for improvement. Currently, we are in the design phase – solutioning for a future suite of services, through collaborative ideation and convergence work. We will share advice for peer institutions interested in enhancing their own repository services through the use of this powerful approach.