Slide 1: Intro

We're both involved with developing research data services for the University. In this talk we will share our

experience developing a policy document for Temple's data-focused institutional repository.

We hope our "lessons learned" will be useful for those of you planning a repository -- and, if you've already built

one -- we hope you will be inspired to share your stories with us!

Slide 2: Background

Temple University is a public research university with 17 schools and colleges and 38,000 students, located in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

We're excited to be moving into a brand new library building in 2018.

The push for a data-focused institutional repository at Temple came out of a meeting of the Library's nascent

research data services group in the fall of 2014.

A meeting with our Office of Research confirmed that they shared our interest in an IR -- as a way to promote and

increase the discoverability of our faculty's various 'products of research.'

Slide 3: Teams

The head of our Digital Libraries Initiatives department, Delphine Khanna, decided that we should do a Hydra

instance for a pilot repository.

We created two teams -- one for development and one for service implementation.

One of the tasks for the service team -- that Margaret leads -- is to draft the policy for the pilot, and also for the

larger, full-scale implementation of the repository.

Slide 4: Other People’s Policies

The first thing the Service Team did was look at a number of policies in place at other institutions. These were

collected by our virtual intern, pictured here. Even though we had a pretty good idea of what to include, looking at

these policies brought up things we hadn’t thought about (like What if someone tries to use the repository as a

platform to publish a journal?) and offered different responses to problems we hadn’t yet solved (like different ways

to deal with embargoes).

Slide 5: University Policies

In addition to those policies, we happened upon a number of university policies and official documents that

mentioned or were related to research data. One important find was the lack of a data ownership policy. I

impulsively decided to call Legal Counsel and ask them who owns our researchers’ data. It turned out, like most

institutions, the university owns it, but they are in the process of rewriting that policy. Because of our conversation,

they became aware of the Library’s interest in this area and my new found contact assured me he’ll keep us in the

loop as that policy is developed.

We’re still exploring how these other examples shown might affect us.

Slide 6: Wish Click

After reading the internal and external policies, the Service Team put together a wishlist of things we would want to

see addressed in our own policy. We don't have any authority to declare official policy ourselves, so we called a

meeting with our larger administrative group to go through the list line by line and see what we could and couldn’t

do.

Slide 7: Discussions

Despite all the preparation we’d done, there was still a lot of discussion about many points. Some of these were

issues of storage space, how we could encourage best practices without creating barriers to adoptions, how our

service would differ from Computer Services storage options, whether more cross-campus administrators needed to

be on board before we could move forward, and what the University Press can do with what’s deposited.

Our lesson here was that there would always be uncertainty and debate. At some point we just had to say “Can we

say this: yes or no?” and move on without further philosophical discussion. We didn’t get through the whole list, so

our next steps from this meeting were to have another meeting to finish going over it and to take legal questions to

Legal Counsel.

Slide 8: Legal

When we met with Legal Counsel, we asked four basic questions and got four basic answers -- that you can see here.

Then we had an interesting, far-reaching discussion for an hour -- we're still waiting to see if we get billed!.

A caveat -- what we present here today is merely our understanding of what was said and should not be confused

with their actual legal advice!

A main take away was "Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep."

We were also interested to hear that our University claims ownership on a case-by-case basis and that they believe

that funder/publisher policies will generally will take precedence.

The lawyer we spoke to had an expectation that people would click through agreements both on deposit and

download – and he expressed concern about the files in the repository not being ADA compliant.

We’re still investigating our responsibilities there.

Slide 9: Where We Are Now

After our meetings with our administrative group and with Legal, we had enough information to write the draft

policy for the pilot project. After this conference we’ll be sending it to our administrative group for review and then

have our guy in Legal take a look at it. And then – finally- we can get a test group for the pilot.

Slide 10: Lessons

We’ve learned a lot so far. Some of our key take aways in addition to what we’ve already discussed are the

importance of having an elevator speech: I repeatedly had to explain what we're doing to stakeholders - sometimes

unexpectedly when I wasn't planning on talking about it.

It’s great to include as many stakeholders as possible, but the more people who get involved, the more questions you

will have. At some point you have to decide you have enough answers and press GO.

Having this pilot project gives us the opportunity to test the policy along with the technology and services. I’m sure

more questions will arise.

Our lessons may not help you avoid your own headaches, but we hope hearing about our experience will help you

prepare for them as you go through similar processes.

Thank you.