Learning As We Go, Go, Go: Reflections from Developing and Delivering an Early Adopter Program for a Shared Repository Service in Canada

Scholaris is a new national opt-in shared repository service that aims to support open discovery, management, sharing and preservation of Canadian scholarship by providing scalable infrastructure, technical expertise and community support for Canadian institutional repositories. The service is being developed by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) and the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL), in collaboration with regional consortia and the broader repository community. The shared technical infrastructure, built on the DSpace platform, is hosted and managed by Scholars Portal at UTL.

In the Spring of 2024, we launched an Early Adopter Program to work with institutions representing a wide range of repository and migration scenarios and through that  process, better understand what’s needed to support Canadian IRs from a service perspective. From previous feasibility studies, we knew there was interest in a shared repository service but the program uptake far exceeded our expectations. Over the last year and a half, we’ve onboarded, migrated, and launched more than twenty institutions (!) —and we’ve learned a lot along the way. In this presentation, we’ll share how we’ve project managed a myriad of migrations, what we’ve learned from working closely with our wonderful Early Adopters and Network of Expert Groups, and how these insights are informing the on-going evolution and delivery of the service and the development of community resources and recommendations.