The human infrastructure: building community to support repository collaborations

Two decades into the repository movement, there have been huge advances in repository technology and the efforts to establish repositories as important research infrastructure. Still, librarians and repository managers on many campuses struggle to encourage a local research culture that promotes the use and support of repositories. This workshop will use interactive exercises to highlight existing resources, plan new initiatives, and build community to support the human infrastructure of repositories. There is a tendency to collaborate on technological infrastructure more visibly than we collaborate around scholarly communication services. This session aims to facilitate targeted collaboration opportunities with colleagues across regions, platforms, and experience levels and explore support structures that might enable further community building. By encouraging the use of shared resources and the repository community to build cross-repository practices and solutions we hope this workshop will promote ongoing conversations between repository managers and foster a culture of collaboration that supports these projects.