Institutional Repository Management Models that Support Faculty Research Dissemination

When promoting institutional repositories (IRs), there is often a disconnect between librarians and their faculty. Emphasizing escalating journal prices, open access mandates, and collection building, librarians tend to approach faculty scholarship as an organizational resource to be managed. In contrast, faculty are often focused on issues such as tenure, career development, and academic freedom. Their scholarship is a personal activity which represents their accomplishments. Unless librarians consciously work to bridge this values gap, institutional repositories can flounder, sitting empty and underutilized. One of the most successful approaches for librarians when addressing these issues has been to implement a mediated deposit approach. Framing their repository as a service, librarians actively identify eligible faculty publications, determine copyright status, solicit author participation, and upload documents into the repository system. This approach not only enables librarians to carry out their traditional roles in collection development and bibliographic control, it also gives them an opportunity to work with faculty in disseminating and promoting their individual scholarship. Taking this approach one step further, Boise State has expanded its repository services to include the development of faculty researcher sites. Created by library staff, each site is customized based on the faculty member\u27s vita and is designed to showcase an individual professor\u27s scholarship. Using the concept of mass customization, Boise State has been able to successfully implement this service to the entire campus and has created and actively maintains over 300 sites, individually reaching over 70% of the tenure track faculty. By shifting the management structure of its institutional repository from a collection development focus to a service oriented approach, Boise State has created an IR that responds to local needs while also building a valuable collection. This presentation will explore the mediated deposit model and workflows that facilitate the dissemination of academic research. It will also explain the concept of mass customization and how that approach can be applied in an academic library setting in support of faculty scholarship

ScholarWorks is a Service

These presentation notes describes how we framed our institutional repository as a service, how that approach influenced our decisions, and how this framework is evolving

Experiences in deploying metadata analysis tools for institutional repositories

Current institutional repository software provides few tools to help metadata librarians understand and analyze their collections. In this article, we compare and contrast metadata analysis tools that were developed simultaneously, but independently, at two New Zealand institutions during a period of national investment in research repositories: the Metadata Analysis Tool (MAT) at The University of Waikato, and the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS) at the National Library of New Zealand. The tools have many similarities: they are convenient, online, on-demand services that harvest metadata using OAI-PMH; they were developed in response to feedback from repository administrators; and they both help pinpoint specific metadata errors as well as generating summary statistics. They also have significant differences: one is a dedicated tool wheres the other is part of a wider access tool; one gives a holistic view of the metadata whereas the other looks for specific problems; one seeks patterns in the data values whereas the other checks that those values conform to metadata standards. Both tools work in a complementary manner to existing Web-based administration tools. We have observed that discovery and correction of metadata errors can be quickly achieved by switching Web browser views from the analysis tool to the repository interface, and back. We summarize the findings from both tools' deployment into a checklist of requirements for metadata analysis tools

Experiences in deploying metadata analysis tools for institutional repositories

Current institutional repository software provides few tools to help metadata librarians understand and analyze their collections. In this article, we compare and contrast metadata analysis tools that were developed simultaneously, but independently, at two New Zealand institutions during a period of national investment in research repositories: the Metadata Analysis Tool (MAT) at The University of Waikato, and the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS) at the National Library of New Zealand. The tools have many similarities: they are convenient, online, on-demand services that harvest metadata using OAI-PMH; they were developed in response to feedback from repository administrators; and they both help pinpoint specific metadata errors as well as generating summary statistics. They also have significant differences: one is a dedicated tool wheres the other is part of a wider access tool; one gives a holistic view of the metadata whereas the other looks for specific problems; one seeks patterns in the data values whereas the other checks that those values conform to metadata standards. Both tools work in a complementary manner to existing Web-based administration tools. We have observed that discovery and correction of metadata errors can be quickly achieved by switching Web browser views from the analysis tool to the repository interface, and back. We summarize the findings from both tools' deployment into a checklist of requirements for metadata analysis tools

Measuring Value in Open Access Repositories

Open access institutional repositories were created to promote access to information, encourage scholarly communication, and demonstrate institutional prestige. While these repositories have been widely adopted, the quality of their contents often fails to represent their institution's scholarly output. Moreover, current research uses measurements of quantity, not quality, to assess their value. In response, this article opens new areas of scholarly inquiry by assessing the quality of contents. This is accomplished through a cross-sectional study of repositories at American colleges and universities across the academic spectrum, using citation indexing to identify an institution's articles and authors of highest impact

The IR has Two Faces: Positioning Institutional Repositories for Success

This article will describe ongoing efforts at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries to evolve the role of the institutional repository (IR) and to effectively position it within the context of the Libraries’ collections, research support, and scholarly communication services. A major component of this process is re-examining the fundamental aims of the IR and aligning it to the Libraries and the campus strategic goals. The authors situate UNLV Libraries’ experience within the context of the current literature to provide background and reasoning for our decision to pursue two, at times conflicting, aims for the IR: one for scholarly communication and another for research administration

OAI services in Academicians: Looking Forward

The main focus of this paper is to look the forward of Open Access Initiative (OAI) in academicians Were to be tried and perhaps implemented on a global academicians it must made known to the local audience first. This can only be achieved if the OAI services in academicians services such as ‘Information Society’. In the case of the OAI services in academicians used in the study; it has benefits directly or indirectly and eventually become more accepted

Building an Institutional Repository with Student Scholarship

Student scholarship should be an integral part of any institutional repository, as it can showcase the important work that students do during their time at the institution. This chapter proposes that an initial focus on student scholarship can aid colleges and universities in building their institutional repositories quickly. This method of collection building can also help to quickly achieve buy-in from campus stakeholders. University administrators will like seeing strong initial usage numbers and can feel confident that the repository will be a good project to fund into the future. Faculty members will see a stable system in which they can feel confident in self-archiving their scholarship. Current and prospective students will see the opportunities available to them to publish their work and disseminate it widely. Focusing on student scholarship has allowed Coastal Carolina University\u27s institutional repository, CCU Digital Commons, to quickly facilitate others\u27 engagement with our student work and has revealed the great extent to which our institution\u27s student scholarship is shared and utilized globally