What Skills Do You Need To Run The Archive?
The eprints in an EPrints Archive are the electronically-distributed versions of journal articles and conference papers deposited by researchers to provide maximum access to their own research. The person(s) responsible for an EPrints archive therefore must be able to encourage as many researchers as possible to deposit as many eprints as possible with as much information about them as will make them usefully accessible, all in a timely and sustainable fashion.
Benefits of an EPrint Archive
At one level, the manager must be able to motivate the researchers for whom they are responsible by helping them to understand the significant benefits for themselves and their institution in terms of visibility and research impact. Without these benefits, the task degenerates into creating new administrative hurdles for an already overworked and naturally sceptical audience.
At another level, the archive manager must have sufficient information management expertise (or editorial experience, or librarianship skills) to be able to understand the issues that may arise with bibliographic metadata in general, as well as the additional information that their institution may wish to collect (is it important to store the identity of the Research Group or Project which produced a paper, how can an author be uniquely identified, are student theses or technical reports to be included, etc.). Once the archive is in place and registered with the OAI (Open Archives Initiative), it will automatically be included in a global program of metadata harvesting and other added-value services run by academic and scientific institutions across the globe (including federated searching, bibliographic extraction, citation analysis, subject mapping and visualisation, cataloguing and classification) which will provide many different ways of accessing the material stored in your institution's archive.