This paper surveys the evolution of practice and rationale for the institutional research repository, looks at existing use studies and opinion surveys of users, and examines ways in which university libraries, the main proponents, have changed their approaches in response to their experience. The experience of Swinburne University of Technology, a partner in the Australian ARROW project, is drawn upon.

The Gartner Hype Curve is a tool introduced by the Gartner Group in the 1990’s to explain general phenomena of interest in new technologies. This framework plots the typical progression of a technology from its early introduction through its maturation to broad market acceptance. The first question is answered by an investigation into the status of digital repositories in the context of the Gartner Hype Curve. The second question is answered by plotting institutional repositories on the product life cycle (Sigmoid Curve) and the third question is answered by applying the Diffusion of Innovation Theory to institutional repositories.

Internet computing is just a special case of something much more powerful: the ability for communities to share resources as they tackle common goals. Business today is increasingly international and multidisciplinary. It is not unusual for corporations to span states, countries and continents. It is also not unusual for corporations to bundle together a variety of industries and to collect information and generate expertise in various areas of business, technology and science. E‑mail and the World Wide Web provide basic mechanisms that allow such groups to work together. But what if they could link their data, computers and other resources into a single virtual office? So-called Grid‑technologies seek to make this possible by providing the protocols, services and software development kits needed to enable flexible, controlled resource sharing on a large scale.

The World Wide Web has facilitated unprecedented ways of speedy global information sharing. The Grid‑technology will build on this by allowing facilitating the global sharing of not just information but of tangible assets to be used at a distance. Very large databases - literary terabytes and petabytes of information - that now are geographically confined will become Grid‑sharable. This is why - in addition to the computational Grid technology recent efforts are directed into developing data-Grid infrastructures[1].

[1] The most outstanding example is the European Data Grid project (EDG) and its successor EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) headed by CERN and founded by the European Commission.

We have recently started a process of “prophesy” and planning.

What type of changes do we anticipate? What will the university require from its library during the next years? What type of staff will become necessary in the year 2015?

The library seems likely to remain the prime provider of learning space on campus, as well as an oracle within information literacy questions. What is left of paper collections will mostly be in its domain, and it may be heavily involved in the publishing of university research.

There are a number of other questions pending, though.

How will the transfer of information from the publisher to the end user take place in a digitised world? Will researchers search, pick and buy from large repositories of digitised periodicals provided by the publishers, or by commercial Internet-libraries? Will students buy their own textbooks, borrow them from the library or lease access to whatever they need for the duration of their study?

Traditional university libraries, with large collections of physical items of information, may become wholly or partially obsolete.

Direct marketing may facilitate sales of digital information straight from the publisher to the end user. The music industry is doing this today! You may download what you wish from a large selection on the Internet, at a reasonable price.

The university library may become the central marketing tool for information to the university community, rather than a repository of information in its own right.

University staff and students may become their own librarians, the same way we already have, to a large extent, become our own travel agents.

This paper will look at the way the NTNU Library is meeting its age bomb and the age of globalisation. Predictions of future trends within our different library departments will be discussed, along with a variety of possible scenarios for the future.