Secrets of Success: Identifying Success Factors in Institutional Repositories

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 08:30 AM – 09:30 AMThere is little agreement on which factors lead to successful institutional repositories. Researchers primarily cite content recruitment and services as key factors; however, there has also been discussion of measuring IR success in terms of how well the IR furthers the overall goals of the library. This paper examines the topic of IRs and success. Our findings are based on a comparative case study of five IRs in colleges and universities. We argue that success should be measured by both internal (e.g., content or services) as well as external factors - how well the IR fulfills or brings the library closer to achieving its long-term goals in terms of service to the academic community.Institute of Museum and Library Service

Disaster planning for digital repositories

This study examines how digital repositories with a preservation mandate are engaging in disaster planning, particularly in relation to their pursuit of trusted digital repository status. For those that are engaging in disaster planning, the study examines the creation of formal disaster response and recovery plans. Findings indicate that the process of going through an audit for certification as a trusted repository provides the incentive needed for the creation of formalized disaster planning documentation, and that repositories struggle with making their documentation available. This study also finds several significant obstacles with regard to the creation of formal disaster planning documentation, including the efforts required to get buy‐in from different functional areas within the organization, difficulty collaborating with the IT department, and the amount of time required for completion of the documentation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106841/1/14505001058_ftp.pd

Data reuse and sensemaking among novice social scientists

We know little about the data reuse practices of novice data users. Yet large scale data reuse over the long term depends in part on uptake from early career researchers. This paper examines 22 novice social science researchers and how they make sense of social science data. Novices are particularly interested in understanding how data: 1) are transformed from qualitative to quantitative data, 2) capture concepts not well‐established in the literature, and 3) can be matched and merged across multiple datasets. We discuss how novice data users make sense of data in these three circumstances. We find that novices seek to understand the data producer's rationale for methodological procedures and measurement choices, which is broadly similar to researchers in other scientific communities. However we also find that they not only reflect on whether they can trust the data producers' decisions, but also seek guidance from members of their disciplinary community. Specifically, novice social science researchers are heavily influenced by more experienced social science researchers when it comes to discovering, evaluating, and justifying their reuse of other's data.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96429/1/14504901068_ftp.pd

Complementary Data as Metadata: Building Context for the Reuse of Video Records of Practice

Data reuse is often dependent on context external to the data. At times, this context is actually additional data that helps data reusers better assess and/or understand the target data upon which they are focused. We refer to these data as complementary data and define these as data external to the target data which could be used as evidence in their own right. In this paper, we specifically we focus on video records of practice in education. Records of practice are a type of data that more broadly document events surrounding teaching and learning. Video records of practice are an interesting case of data reuse as they can be extensive (e.g., days or weeks of video of a classroom), result in large files sizes, and require both metadata and other complementary data in order for reusers to understand the events depicted in the video. Through our mixed methods study, consisting of a survey of data reusers in 4 repositories and 44 in-depth interviews, we identified the types of complementary data that assist reusers of video records of practice for either teaching and/or research. While there were similarities in the types of complementary data identified as important to have when reusing VROP, the rationales and motivations for seeking out particular complementary data differed depending on whether the intended use was for teaching or research. While metadata is an important and valuable means of describing data for reuse, data’s meaning is often constructed through comparison, verification, or elucidation in reference to other data. &nbsp

Scritti Di Teoria Archivistica Italiana: Rassegna Bibliografica a cura di Isabella Massabò Ricci and Marco Carassi. Rome: Ministero per ibeni e le attivita culturali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 2000. Writing on Italian Archival Theory: Bibliographical Survey translated by John Fliffe, William Joung, and Paul Metcalfe

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/41813/1/10502_2004_Article_359689.pd