Implementing an Institutional Repository: 2009 Midwinter Symposium

Robert Tansley

Abstract: This presentation will be current and up-to-date and therefore a meaningful title and abstract have not been created for advance publicity.

Biography

Robert Tansley's accidental involvement with digital repository systems can be traced back to 1999 in Southampton, UK, when Stevan Harnad threw this impoverished PhD student a financial lifeline in return for maintaining CogPrints, a cognitive science repository. Stevan asked "Robert, can you make this work for other subjects too?" Robert eyed his student bank balance and replied "no, but if you pay me I'll write you a system that can". That system was EPrints. Soon after the first version was done, in late 2000 HP Labs lured Robert to Boston with misleading claims of fame, fortune and a sunny climate to lead the development of some new-fangled project called DSpace. DSpace was sufficiently addictive that it took over 5 years and the closing of two HP Labs offices in Cambridge MA for Robert to finally get the hint and start working at Google on... well, you'll just have to come and see the talk.