RAD-UNAM: Genesis and evolution of a repository administrators group

In this talk, we will present RAD-UNAM, the Network of Digital Collections (Red de Acervos Digitales).

UNAM is Mexico's (and Latin America's) largest university, with over 300,000 students, and produces close to half of all of the country's academic publications. Due to its size, in many aspects, the university operates almost as a federation of faculties and research centers, lacking coordination in several key areas.

RAD-UNAM is a network, firstly, among people interested in promoting awareness on the need for having properly set up digital repositories (that is, beyond being digital dumps, adhering to internationally recognized catalogation standards), as well as on the need to offer our academic material under Open Access licensing terms, and only as a logical consequence, a network of actual repositories using OAI-PMH and DublinCore as a technological basis.

Given the social characteristics of the professors and researchers of UNAM (mainly, an aging faculty which struggles coming to grips with the modern flows of information, and anachronic evaluation mechanisms), an important part of our job has been to convince the faculty on the importance of Open Access, and how it does not undermine their research.

RAD-UNAM is currently made up by nine repositories, not only spanning very different knowledge fields but also organizationally very different entities, each of them with objects of very different nature, and a central harvester.

Our group has become a referent for repository creation and management in our region, and is slowly advancing towards incorporating as an institutional project.