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Using Institutional Repositories and Special Collections to Enhance Institutional Visibility

Harold Thiele, Ph.D.

COMO XXIV, Macon, GA

October 5, 2012

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Environment

More and more institutions either have established institutional repositories or special collections, or are planning to establish institutional repositories or special collections.

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Institutions

What types of institutions are we talking about?

Academic Libraries

Government Libraries

Public Libraries

Special Libraries

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Location

Most institutional repositories and special collections function as sub-units of libraries or archives.

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Enhance Institutional Visibility

One important goal of the institutional repository or special collection is to enhance the institutional visibility.

Justify the existence of the institutional repository or special collection.

Attract additional support and funding.

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Audiences

Internal audienceAttract the attention and interest of institutional members

Contribute material– Grow the collection

Utilize materials– Justifies the collection

Recognize the value of the collection– Administrators & Managers

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Audiences

External audienceAttract the attention and interest of non-institutional persons

Contribute material– Grow the collection

Utilize materials– Justifies the collection

Recognize the value of the collection– Funders and stakeholders

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Internal Techniques

Contribute materialInstitutional Mandate (1)

Materials are required to be deposited in the institutional repository.Most common in corporate and government environments.Often restricted access.

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Mesa Verde National Park

All research/scholarly materials are deposited in the institutional repository.

Organized using site locations based on GPS backbone.

Over 130 years of material deposited.

Under the museum.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

All research/scholarly materials are deposited in the institutional repository.All senior researchers & managers must provide detailed exit interviews to the repository.Under archives.Restricted access.

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Lockheed

All research/scholarly materials are deposited in the institutional repository.

Goes back to the 1920s.

Under the library.

Restricted access.

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Internal Techniques

Contribute materialInstitutional Mandate (2)

Materials are required or strongly recommended to be deposited in the institutional repository. Peer pressure.

Most common in academic environments.

Open access.

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Harvard DASH

Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. Each faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles.Integrated so fully into other faculty tools that self-archiving just becomes second nature.Opt out system.

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Harvard DASH

Market content using website, citation, and promotion of articles and other materials added to the repository.

Work in DASH, it becomes visible to colleagues around the world by virtue of metadata harvesting, Google Scholar, and other indexing services.

Higher visibility leads to higher rates of citation and impact.

When you post early versions of your work, before publication, you establish intellectual priority sooner.

Using social media (twitter) to promote new additions to the repository.

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DSpace@MIT

MIT's institutional repository built to save, share, and search MIT's digital research materials including an increasing number of conference papers, images, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, preprints, technical reports, theses, working papers, and more.

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DSpace@MIT

Success 5,000 scholarly articles that MIT Faculty have made openly available on the web under their Open Access Policy. Articles have been viewed more than 380,000 times since the collection was launched in October 2009.

Downloaded at a rate that has grown to more than 30,000 per month, with requests from nearly every country in the world .

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DSpace@MIT

Success DSpace@MIT content was downloaded directly by end-users over 15.2 million times or, on average, at a rate of over 41,000 files per day.

Contains selected digital theses and dissertations from all MIT departments dating as far back as the mid-1800s. Since 2004, all new Masters and Ph.D theses have been added to the collection after degrees have been awarded.

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DSpace@MIT

Actively promote the archives using website, publicity, articles.

Strong community pressure (peer pressure) to contribute to the repository.

Grew out of paper repository. Tradition at MIT for professors to leave their papers to the archives.

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Building Content

Survey resources to identify content on hand.

Begin building community support for the repository.

Clarify intellectual property issues.

Encourage deposits of content.Security & preservation

Promotion

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Building Content

Encouragement to deposit items is not sufficient to raise self-archiving above 15% (Harnad 2006)Mandated deposits are required to move beyond the slow, expensive, time intensive piecemeal process most institutions used. Mandated student deposits to mandated faculty deposits.

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Building Student Content

Several institutions have focused on building student content.

Some focus on undergraduate workOthers focus on thesis and dissertations

Requiring deposit as a condition of graduation helps to ensure content growth.Provide a fixed location for the materials.

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Reference Librarians

Reference librarians are an important link in promoting the institutional repository and/or special collections.

Reference librarians are subject experts and work as collection development specialists.

They interface with the departments and are well position to promote the IR and open access to their departments.

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Cooperative Efforts

Most smaller schools do not have the presence that larger schools have.

By forming cooperative Institutional Repositories schools increase the quantity of material they are able to present raising their visibility and reducing costs.

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Cooperative Efforts (2)

Institutions with similar interests can create a larger Internet visibility by forming cooperative associations.

Hosting the content on specialized hosting sites can also reduce costs and increase visibility.

Open Archive (National Library of Medicine)

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GKR = GALILEO Knowledge Repository Project

Cooperative Institutional Repository headed by Georgia Tech.

Each school has its own space and brand.

Metadata is harvested jointly and provided to Internet search engines.

Plan is to move hosting to Open Archive to reduce costs and increase visibility.

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The Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository (LASR)

Openly accessible repository that documents the scholarly and other creative activity of students and faculty of small, selective liberal arts colleges.

Provides individual scholars and students at those institutions the opportunity to share, explore, discover, and evolve the ideas, experience, and inquiry fundamental to liberal education.

LASR is the name of a collaborative group, currently consisting of Bucknell University, Carleton College, Grinnell College, St. Lawrence University, Trinity University, the University of Richmond, and Whitman College.

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The Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository (LASR)

African Digital Library Support Network (ADLSN)

Enhancing knowledge access by promoting and assisting the development of low-cost digital libraries in Africa by promoting node development.

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Significant Barriers

CopyrightPublisher permission, fear of infringing copyright, publisher policies sow confusion.

AgeYounger faculty more readily self archive than older faculty. Used to using Internet for resource location.

Time & EffortGreater the time & effort required, the less likely to self-archive.

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Positive Influences

Accessibility

Increased communication with peers, discovery using Internet search engines, long-term preservation. Open access is an important component.

PublicityEnlarged readership, increased potential impact, earlier dissemination of research findings. Use of web resources and social media.

Professional RecognitionIncreased visibility, increased citations. Some studies show up to a 25% increase in citation rate.