Hitting the ground running: building New Zealand’s first publicly available institutional repository

Abstract

A fully functional and publicly available, digital institutional repository (IR) in the space of just ten days? The technology was available, the time was right, the team was right and technical assistance from colleagues in Australia was on hand a mere cyber call away. This paper reports on how we were able to “hit the ground running” in building an open access IR in such a short space of time. What has taken our breath away is not so much the speed of the process, but the scale of responsiveness from the Internet community. Consequently, we also consider the research impact of more than 18,000 downloads from eighty countries, less than three months into the project!