There were so many good presentations at Best Practices Exchange 2007, that is doesn't seem fair to single out any one of them as "really cool", but I can't think of another phrase for Robert Hulshof-Schmidt's Creating an Online Documents Repository on a Shoestring presentation.

Robert is on the staff of the Oregon State Library and he described how his library used a new depository law, the mixed blessing of a statewide Content Management System and some nifty programming to create a system that automatically harvests agency publications, deposits them to a library web server and creates a URL for document catalogers. It's not entirely automated. Nothing can be in the current state of affairs, but it sounds like it minimizes the need for human review of a lot of files.

Another nice feature of the Oregon system is that it automatically converts ingested documents into either HTML (if text based) or PDF (if binary based, like Word/Excel). So it looks like OSL is able to do some important potential preservation work at the point of ingestion.

Oregon's document repository can be found at http://egov.oregon.gov/OSL/GRES/REPOS/.