Changing roles of reference librarians: the case of the HKUST Institutional Repository

Purpose – This paper proposes describing how reference librarians in an academic library recruit content for its institutional repository, and how their roles have been changed in the process.Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes the background on how institutional repositories have developed in response to the open access movement. The case of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) Institutional Repository is described in detail, showing different strategies that reference librarians employed in recruiting content. The strategies include encouraging researchers to self‐archive papers, scanning web sites, capturing pre‐existing collections of grey literature, and downloading from open access sources.Findings – The paper illustrates how the roles of reference librarians are changed in the process of building the institutional repository. There are extensions of existing roles in terms of system evaluation, advocacy and reference services. Brand new roles include content rec...