The genesis of the process that led to the creation of RepositóriUM – the institutional repository of the University of Minho, in 2003, can be traced back to about a year earlier. In fact, the Documentation Services of the University of Minho (SDUM) crystallized the idea of creating a repository at the end of 2002. Three key inspirational elements can be pointed out as converging towards the creation of an institutional repository at the University of Minho (UMinho).

Firstly, the reading by the then-new director of SDUM of the SPARC Position Paper on institutional repositories. This initial contact with the concept and technologies associated with repositories allowed a pre-existing idea of developing a system for hosting digital theses and dissertations to evolve into the creation of an institutional repository for all intellectual output of UMinho. The second inspiring element resulted from the participation of an SDUM member in the workshop promoted by the Open Archives Forum, held in Lisbon on December 6 and 7, 2002. It provided greater understanding of the OAI-PMH protocol, its importance, and its applicability in the SDUM context. Finally, a challenge issued by the Portuguese government, through the Knowledge and Innovation Mission Unit (UMIC), invited Portuguese universities to submit ideas and projects for a modernization initiative that the government intended to launch in 2003. From the contact between UMIC and UMinho in December 2002, the University Rectorate also challenged SDUM to present a project to be included in UMinho’s application to the e-U Virtual Campus program, as it would later be known. These three circumstances led to the decision to create an institutional repository at the University of Minho, which was included in the SDUM activity plan for 2003 and incorporated as one of the projects in UMinho’s application to the e-U program.

One of the first project phases involved the installation, configuration, and translation into Portuguese of the DSpace platform, an open-source system developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Hewlett-Packard (HP).

The following steps included a pilot phase for uploading theses and dissertations defended at the University of Minho in recent years, as well as other documents (articles, reports, working papers, etc.) produced by four pilot communities that used RepositóriUM experimentally during that period.

The final phase of the RepositóriUM creation process – its official presentation and launch – culminated on November 20, 2003. On that day, a small ceremony was held in the Main Hall of the University of Minho, presided over by the University Rector and attended by various members of the academic community and the media. Through this event, RepositóriUM was officially opened to UMinho and the general public. On its public launch day, RepositóriUM held 280 documents and became the first Portuguese-language repository worldwide to go live using the DSpace platform.

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