Comparison of full-text versus metadata searching in an institutional repository: Case study of the UNT Scholarly Works

Authors in the library science field disagree about the importance of using costly resources to create local metadata records, particularly for scholarly materials that have full-text search alternatives. At the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries, we decided to test this concept by answering the question: What percentage of search terms retrieved results based on full-text versus metadata values for items in the UNT Scholarly Works institutional repository? The analysis matched search query logs to indexes of the metadata records and full text of the items in the collection. Results show the distribution of item discoveries that were based on metadata exclusively, on full text exclusively, and on the combination of both. This paper describes in detail the methods and findings of this study

Developing an Outreach Plan for UNT Scholarly Works

The University of North Texas Scholarly Works collections functions as our institution’s open access repository. This summer, we conducted a preliminary analysis of the collection’s holdings to assess our progress in archiving UNT faculty research in support of our Open Access and Long-term Digital Stewardship policy as passed in 2012. As we do not subscribe to any current research information systems (CRIS), this analysis took the form of a census using current faculty senate data to understand who is and is not contributing to the repository. After looking at our contribution population, we also examined what resource types are contributed to the repository to further leverage those relationships between contributor and resource type. As of August 2016, the UNT Scholarly Works collection contains work from 25% of our current, active faculty members. Although the collection is populated through mediated deposit, this analysis revealed trends for likelihood of contribution to the collection. In looking at these trends, we understand that disciplinary differences exist in terms of support (or not-supporting) open access, particularly as the type of desired scholarly output and its ability to be archived within the repository can change between disciplines. However, the main bottleneck in developing this collection lies in increasing both the number of contributors and the number of items contributed from the UNT community. By identifying contributing and non-contributing faculty, and by drawing attention to their contributed resource types, we can more accurately understand how to perform outreach for the collection. In this presentation we’ll discuss the results of our preliminary analysis of faculty contributions, and our subsequent outreach plan to double our collection’s holdings as well as our contributors

ASIS&T SIG-III's 30th Anniversary Commemorative Publication

Book published for the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Special Interest Group for International Information Issues (SIG-III). As part of the celebrations for the 75th ASIS&T anniversary and 30th anniversary of SIG-III), this special commemorative publication was created. In this anniversary publication, current and past SIG-III officers attempt to capture some of the SIG-III activities and highlight the challenges as well as the successes that the ASIS&T community has had in the last 30 years

Harnessing social media for promoting tourism in Africa: an exploratory analysis of tweets

Tourism has the potential to be the engine of a country’s economic development. Some developing countries, especially those in Africa, rely on tourism for their citizens’ employment. Consequently, the rise and fall of their unemployment rates are closely associated with that of tourist numbers. Hence, they need to constantly find ways to promote their cultural heritage in order to attract more tourists. Some of the key promotion tools are social media such as Twitter and an investigation to understand the nature of tweets about cultural heritage institutions is an important undertaking. However, investigations into the nature of tweets about African cultural heritage are non-existent. Our research aims to shed some light on the broad characteristics of tweets about African cultural heritage. We also identify possible implications and suggest potential strategies for tourism organizations, operators, and other stakeholders in their use of Social Media in general and Twitter in particular

"Mapping the Southwest" Project: Collaboration for Curation of Wide-format Items

This presentation discusses the 'Mapping the Southwest' project and the collaboration for curation of wide-format items

Understanding User Discovery of ETD: Metadata or Full-Text, How Did They Get There?

Presentation for the 2015 US Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USETDA) Annual Conference. This presentation discusses understanding user discovery of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and whether users make use of metadata records when searching or full text searching

Two Decades of Advances in Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Presentation for Texas Conference on Digital Libraries 2019. This presentation discusses several emerging trends and scenarios that change the directions of scholarship in general: ranging from the availability of interoperable Open Access contents to cross discipline collaborations, big data and global and explosive growth of social networking. In particular, this presentation provides ETDs evolution in the last twenty years and provide example using the UNT experience. As one of the early adopters of ETD in 1999, the closer look at UNT's ETD collection provide interesting data about the the overall change in ETD production, usages, including locations and types of devices users used to access the ETD collection

Metadata Madness: Quality Issues in Metadata Management

This presentation provides an introductory discussion on metadata quality issues. It outlines factors that influence metadata quality including the resource types, local requirements, collaborators' requirements, and cost issues and addresses how to manage metadata quality

Brown bag on iConference - 2013

This presentation was created for a brown bag luncheon about the 2013 iConference. It includes discussion on participants, the venues, programs, the role of the UNT Libraries, and reflections on the event

Metadata Training Needs Assessment: Final Report

Report prepared for the Texas Digital Library (TDL) Metadata Working Group (MWG). In this report, the focus is on the project that was tasked in creating metadata course/modules for beginners and experts alike