What Dorothea fails to mention in her comment is that I asked to learn about her experience with DSpace at GMU, and she very helpfully replied with a long email that provided me with some of her insights and experience. I of course also recalled many of her blog postings about her institutional repository experiences as well. So….I can take some credit, but certainly not all. The great thing is that there are a lot of people out there now with experience doing this kind of thing, so anyone thinking about doing it shouldn’t be shy about contacting those of us who have some experience.

My recommendations only diverge from his once: a service model is okay for a large institution *at first* — but you have to manage expectations for the long term, and even if you’re *not* planning a service model, you should understand that there WILL be services involved, as when a small campus research institute dumps several gigabytes of papers on your desk and says “Archive these!”