In April of 2008 the Carolinas Chapter of ASIS&T held its inaugural event entitled Institutional Repositories: The Great Debate. In the spirit of 18th and 19th century college debating societies, a challenge was issued for deliberation of a resolution involving the concept of the institutional repository. Two orators accepted the summons to publicly argue the affirmative and negative positions. Helen Tibbo of the School of Information & Library Science at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill took the affirmative; Kevin L. Smith, the scholarly communications officer at Duke University, spoke for the negative position.