In this talk I present a general definition of an institutional repository and proceed to discuss several instances of them at various institutions. We'll view them as responses to the crisis in scholarly communications, as ways to promote student and faculty research, and we'll discuss the way faculty view such repositories. Following that I'll discuss two such repositories at Cornell and we'll also look at arXiv.org, focusing on why the latter disciplinary repository is so wildly successful and the former two significantly less so. We will also look specifically at CUL's implementation of DSpace and discuss factors such as acceptance, use, implementation, and costs and what they may imply for the use of institutional repositories at other institutions.