Small colleges and universities, often late adopters of institutional repositories and open access initiatives, face challenges that have not fully been explored in the professional literature. In an effort to gauge the level of awareness of open access and institutional repositories at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (UWEC), the authors of this article surveyed fellow faculty members at this small liberal arts university before the 2011 Open Access Week. The survey results reveal that faculty members at UWEC do not share the same level of awareness concerning open access and institutional repositories that was found in the existing scholarly literature.