As far as I can tell, this attitude partly comes from the assumption that any materials produced at or by the institution are valuable intellectual property, which would potentially be useful to competitors. On a personal level those competitors may be other departments or even other staff within the same department – the “why should I be the only one doing all the work” attitude. On an broader level any institution which is competing with others for income or funding based on number and success of students is therefore discouraged from making anything available outside its own walls.

Add to this the continual emphasis on avoidance of plagiarism (which often seems to translate to “the only safe thing to do is produce everything yourself”) and heavy-handed management techniques such as discouragement of employee blogging just in case anyone in the power structure might be embarrassed and you get a big bundle of reasons not to share.

I can’t see these forces changing significantly, however many well-intentioned repositories are constructed.

I certainly agree with D’Arcy Norman about the core dynamic. The biggest mistakes we have made have been when we have tried to appeal to the altruism, or even enlightened self-interest, of users. Wrong! Yacapaca has only grown by appealing to the _unenlightened_ self-interest of our target users. They just want to get their teaching job done, and they really don’t give a stuff about metadata, discovery, and all the rest that we thought was so important early on.