An introduction to the profession: Helping with institutional repository upgrades and migrations as an early-career librarian

In the past year, I have been lucky enough to start two new positions in Canadian academic libraries. In September 2023, I started a seven-month contract as Scholarly Communications Intern at University of Victoria Libraries, and in July 2024, I began a twelve-month Limited Term Appointment as a Scholarly Communications Librarian at University of Windsor’s Leddy Library. The first project I joined in both roles was an institutional repository (IR) migration/upgrade. UVicSpace, University of Victoria’s IR, was upgraded from DSpace 6 to DSpace 7, a process that began in August 2023 and was completed in February 2024. Scholarship @ UWindsor, University of Windsor’s IR, has joined cohort three of the Early Adopter Program of the Canadian shared service IR Scholaris (https://scholaris.ca/), and will migrate from bepress Digital Commons to DSpace. The projected timeline for this migration is June 2025, with initial preparations having already begun. In this lightning talk, I will give some personal reflections on what it is to be a recent MLIS graduate/early career librarian, beginning my foray into this profession with two major IR migrations. I will discuss how these IR projects have allowed me to learn the principles of scholarly communications (and what it means to do this work), the collaborative teams I have been able to work with as part of them, the professional opportunities they have enabled for me, and more. I will share personal challenges and successes and give advice to MLIS students and other early career librarians on how to best take advantage of these opportunities if they arise. I hope this talk will also give insight to established and experienced institutional repository managers on how best to bring in new team members to these projects, based on the wonderful mentorship and guidance I have received from my supervisors and colleagues.