Sarah Gentlemen at RIN has a report on the July 2009 “The role of open access and repositories in the arts : a forum for discussion” meeting (presentations are now online).

“some people felt often the arts community don’t actually like using technology, so this is a big challenge to overcome”

Apart from a few Luddite painters and lute-pluckers, I suspect what they really don’t like is the level of keyboard-use and reading involved with normal use of the Web. “I don’t like technology” becomes a face-saving shorthand for “I have problems with reading”. But even otherwise-able creatives in the visual arts and music are often not avid readers of dense texts such as the ones in repositories, certainly. And arts managers, especially, have almost always landed in that position because they’re “people people” who prefer talking (and talking and talking and talking while saying very little of substance, while you try in vain to get a word in edgeways) to serious reading.

“The idea that users won’t actually use your repository website directly, but that they access the content via a search engine (like Google) is not yet fully appreciated or understood by institutions.”

Spot on. Although that’s no reason for allowing arts repository pages to remain so visually dull and unappealing.