This keynote was delivered at the very first Repository Fringe conference in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2008.
It is the first 45-minute presentation I ever gave. I was well used to 20-minute presentations and several-hour workshops by 2008, but this presentation and a few subsequent ones showed I didn’t yet have a handle on the 45-minute length. I badly overwrote this talk, and had to adjust in real-time.
Eventually I learned to make well-timed 45-minute presentations, but it took me a few years.
The day after I gave this the-repository-is-dead keynote, Niamh Brennan of Trinity College started her own talk by walking slowly to the speaker’s podium cradling a laptop (representing an institutional repository) draped in a long white cloth. She laid it down, quipping “Look! The body in the library!” and then proceeded to deliver Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar over it in her lovely Irish-accented voice. I have never had a talk of mine riffed on so hilariously or effectively since.