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Yesterday during the opening keynote, Dr. James Hilton touched on a number of familiar themes from the recently released report on Software and Collaboration in Higher Education. It was interesting to hear him discuss the differing approaches to developing and supporting open source software in general and the implications that that structure has on the emerging open repository community.

In the sessions that followed and the poster reception later that day, the themes of community and collaboration, calls for greater interoperability, standards based approaches, and communal development became commonplace. I had several interesting conversations with conference attendees about how they intend to use their repository applications (uses vary from dedicated institutional repository approaches to employing varied application/interface design to float multiple collection types within a single application).

A number of presentations/conversations at the conference are emphasizing the problems that libraries are experiencing when attempting to build community support for their institutional repository instances. Despite this, a number of projects, including the DLESE presentation (Thursday afternoon session) continued to present mechanisms by which these core repository applications could be tuned to enable community use.