This workshop took place on the last day of the ECDL2007 Conference in Budapest, Hungary. The participants were from all over Europe, and each had slightly different purposes in attending the workshop. One of the things that struck me during the day was that although everyone comes from different backgrounds and circumstances, they were still keen to talk to each other and find out how other people were approaching the concept of repositories within their own institutions, and what difficulties people were finding.

Several presentations were given on an actual “Repository Ecology”, and people’s interpretation of what that meant. There was quite a range of interpretations, and of course, many of which varied from what MY interpretation had been – it was clear that we had all thought of Repository Ecology based on our own backgrounds and experiences. All the presentations given though, were extremely valid and also showed that the concept of what a Repository Ecology actually is, is perhaps too broad to be functional.

We had a couple of quite technical, indepth presentations of how an ecology such as this would exist. Based on my experiences at the time (being part of the RUBRIC project which was such a large collaborative effort), my primary thought process when looking at the concept of a Repository Ecology was how it would work on a ‘people-scale’ – ie how people would communicate effectively, what tools they would / could use to facilitate this, who would be a central point of contact / driver, what infrastructure has to be in place to support this. So this was what I based my presentation around. I guess it’s a different level of looking at the repository ecology concept.

What I really enjoyed about this day, was that no one was trying to be prescriptive and say that Solution X was the only way to go. Instead, everyone was giving their input into all the different levels of the Ecology and how they would operate. I found it a very worthwhile day, and really enjoyed seeing people from such a variety of repository backgrounds get their heads together to come up with suggestions about how to establish a Repository Ecology throughout Europe. I’ll be keeping tabs on what happens from here, to see how it all develops.