Dorothea Salo:
I can’t establish that I was the first to decry “build it and they will come” thinking with regard to institutional repositories.
Susan Gibbons decried it in 2006 with regard to the Rochester repository. In her slide “early misunderstandings”:
Early Misunderstandings
Faculty see need for repository
Faculty see value in repository
Self-archiving is a practical expectation
Technology is the difficult part
Build it and they will come!
Sounds like a prescient bullet point summary of a cavlec post or two.
I remember Susan's talk as inspiring. They built it. Users didn't come. They responded by doing anthropology on the users to find out what they wanted, in order to work out what to build next time, and followed up with projects like the one I mentioned here where I gave some advice along with Jim Downing, whose desk I'm sitting at right now in Cambridge.
(The Rochester work is cited in Roach Motel I believe.)
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