The project will focus on the individual’s interaction with the Repository at every stage. It will investigate how social networking tools might facilitate the stakeholders’ connection between
the necessary institutional functions of the repository and the individual’s own use and
exploitation of it. The project comes at an ideal time for the Institutional Repository project in
giving us the opportunity to test these tools as the technical environment develops, and also to engage early adopters at a crucial stage of the project.

A range of social networking tools already in use by the stakeholder groups for both projects will be used. These include social bookmarking, informal tagging, synchronous and asynchronous communication and text clipping and will be organised to support the following:

• Stakeholders commenting on the various processes around the use of the repository, and encouraging each other in the deposit of materials.
• Onward signposting and bookmarking of resources elsewhere to promote use of both in-house and other materials.
• Members of the project team engaging with users both in guiding them in use of the system, and in observing user behaviour and comment on the use of the materials in the repository to feed this into improvements in the system.

The project will also look at traditional approaches to information retrieval, in which the student / researcher / academic may be concerned with the amount of information potentially available to them vis à vis the proportion of that information they retrieve and compare this to the quality of the information they retrieve and how much they then go on to use and recommend to others.

User involvement in this project will be key: it is hoped that the social networking tools will both inform and improve their use of the system from a community point of view, and will feedback into the development process.