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The development of institutional repositories has typically involved administrative and technical staff from libraries and campuses, with little input from reference librarians and subject specialists. Reference librarians have vital roles to play in helping to recruit authors to submit their content to institutional repositories, as well as in educating users to search such repositories effectively and retrieve the scholarly content from them. Aims to investigate these roles.

Describes how the University of Oregon Libraries built its institutional repository, promoted and marketed it, and developed partnerships within the library and across the campus using the expertise of reference/subject librarians.

At many institutions, institutional repository development has relied heavily on technical and administrative staff. Reference/subject librarians have not played as active a role as they can and should. Because reference librarians are often also subject specialists with liaison responsibilities to specific disciplines, their knowledge of the specialized research needs and scholarly communication patterns of the different disciplines can inform every step of the institutional repository's growth.

Experience at the University of Oregon demonstrates the efficacy of involving reference librarians in the design and development of an institutional repository from the beginning. The experience that reference librarians have in searching a wide array of databases enables them to provide a useful perspective on the design of effective search interfaces for institutional repositories.

This paper explores the representation of consequential women in history within children's and young adult biographies.

The data pool was established by developing a list of women's names extracted from common textbooks and state social studies curricula. Early-grade (K-4th) and middle-grade (5th-8th) in-print books were selected for juxtaposition because these students have the least prior knowledge and are perhaps most dependent on the text. Two researchers independently engaged in qualitative content analysis research methods, which included open and axial coding.

Early- and middle-grade biographies aptly established the historical significance of, but largely failed to contextualize, each figure's experiences, accomplishments and contemporaneous tensions. The women were presented as consequential, though their advocacies were not situated within the larger context.

Limitations included a dearth of women featured in both state standards and biographies, limited audience (early and middle grades) and exclusion of out-of-print books. Comparable inquiries into narrative nonfiction, expository texts and historical fiction, which have different emphases than biographies, are areas for future research.

Discussion focused on the significance of findings for teachers and researchers. Early- and middle-grade teachers are guided to contextualize the selected historical figures using primary and secondary source supplements.

No previous scholarship exists on this particular topic. Comparable inquiries examine trade books' depiction of historical significance, not contextualization of continuity and change.