Institutional repositories and their 'other' users: usability beyond authors

If institutional repositories (IRs) were all that their proponents could have hoped, they would be providing researchers with better access to research, improving institutional prestige, and assisting with formal research assessment. The reality, though, is that IRs are less frequently implemented, harder to fill, and less visible than their advocates would hope or expect. While technical platforms for IRs, such as DSpace and ePrints [8] have seen an abundance of research, little is known about the users of IRs, neither how they use IR software, nor how usable it is for them. IR users can be divided into three main groups: authors, information seekers, and data creators/maintainers; while authors are reasonably well understood, the latter groups are particularly under-studied. [Introduction]