Building community towards interoperability: communities of practice, repositories, and universal indexing

Over the past three years, the Canadian Repositories Community of Practice Steering Committee, supported by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, has been privileged to support a growing community of practice among Canadian repository professionals. While communities of practice are helpful across many disciplines, they can be especially impactful for advancing repository infrastructure. Locally, repository managers are often isolated at their institutions, working with limited resources to try to satisfy institutional stakeholders and encourage people to share their work. However, the greatest potential for institutional repositories lies not in these individual efforts, but as infrastructure to connect scholarly communication worldwide. Working together via a community of practice is great for support, resources, and mentorship, but it also enables us to collaboratively envision the future of universal indexing (Chavarro et al., 2025) and the role we might play as interconnected nodes in a "distributed ecosystem" (COAR, 2024). Our committee work has included hosting regular events, developing a mentorship program, and participating in ongoing conversations around important topics for repositories. We are sharing our experience to inspire others to continue these conversations in their own contexts so we can work together towards interoperability through initiatives that are scalable, non-resource-intensive, and accessible.