Evidence of Researcher Engagement - stories, narratives and anecdotes

On the evening before the SPARC Digital Repositories conference I hosted a meeting to discuss the evidence of researcher engagement from individual testimonials and anecdotes. That seems to have been a bit of a theme throughout the conference: Jennifer Campbell-Meier spoke about gathering stories about repositories as a means of advocacy in the new horizons panel and Bob Witeck spoke about the importance of stories in marketing open access to faculty and management. I hope that we're going to be able to start up a central place for collecting personal testimonials about repository benefits under SPARC's auspices. The idea is that a repository manager or subject librarian can have somewhere to go and look for success stories as told by faculty and researchers from particular disciplines. (Do you wake up in the morning, dreading an advocacy meeting with the Chemistry Department? Why not download a couple of repository testimonials from the chemistry page on repositoryluv.com!) More on this later!