Our Samvera-based institutional repository is nearing eight years old, and one can safely say it is middle aged– and with middle age comes a mid-life crisis. Over the course of the past year, the current product owners have examined the role and vision of the repository and embraced the role of maintainers, advocating for critical external needs. Balancing the technical needs and costs of an aging system while providing new services to meet user needs with a limited technical staff has required being realistic about both available resources and institutional priorities. In this talk, we will discuss our experiences, our methods for refining the focus of a large project, focusing developer work to yield maximum payoffs, and centering the repository to be more useful to the campus community by meeting users where they are.
Presented virtually at Samvera Connect 2020
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