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CentAUR is now publicly accessible at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk, and following a very informative testing period with three ‘early adopter’ academic Schools has been introduced to the rest of the University via: 

• Talks to academic schools and relevant staff in directorates
• A regularly run practical training course in the University’s Centre for Staff Development & Training programme
• Email notification, to School Directors of Research for cascading to academic and research staff. This was sent today, and we have been busy answering queries and handling people’s first deposits. If the repository fills up over the weekend, we’ll know it’s worked. I’m hoping…

Schools are responsible for adding their own content, either via a central administrator or directly by their authors. Both models have been tested successfully and we are now waiting for Schools to tell us their preferred route.

Current content includes publications from the School of Mathematics, Meteorology and Physics (2007-9), the School of Human and Environmental Sciences (2009), the School of Pharmacy (2009) and the School of Systems Engineering. Repository staff will upload references to older publications (2003-9) for the whole University during 2010.

We now have read-only access (on campus) to the first version of CentAUR at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk. Currently CentAUR has 530 deposits, which have been transferred from our pilot EPrints repository.

• User accounts will be set up for Reading staff during the autumn term.
• Public access will follow after the next round of testing and updates, which will include improvements to the home page and the inclusion of cover sheets for full text documents.

Last week we ran our first internal training session for ‘repository supporters’ (library, copyright and REF related staff), as a dry run for staff training sessions. This was very successful in enabling us to test the depositing and editing workflow, training materials and the integral on-screen help. We also received a number of offers of help to assist with the verification and editing of new deposits, once the repository is in use across the University!

Reading’s research outputs online.

Project description
The project aims to facilitate the creation and population of an institutional repository for the entire University. The content will be the bibliographic metadata for all published research outputs from 2010, and the full text, or equivalent multimedia format, wherever possible.

The core objective is to develop a mechanism for recording publications data that will become an essential part of the University’s system for managing the submissions to the forthcoming REF.
Key outcomes will be:
• Increased visibility of and access to the University’s published research outputs
• A central record of publications data that can be used for multiple purposes within the institution
• A permanently established institutional repository that is embedded into the University’s research management processes

Adjacent to the creation of the repository, the project includes the cleansing of and migration to the repository of legacy metadata, 2003-9.