NEW HORIZONS
Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs, The Johns Hopkins University
A Data-centric View of the Academic Universe
The institutional repository (IR) had been advanced as the panacea for a host of challenges such as the rising costs of scholarly journals or defining the relevance of libraries in the digital age. Recently, IRs have been described in a decidedly unflattering manner with some asserting that the movement has already failed. Reality is probably somewhere in between. Our community may be suffering from a case of macromyopia—overestimating the short-term impacts while underestimating the long-term impacts. With previous transformative changes such as the introduction of the automobile, there was a time of hybrid environments when both automobiles and horse-drawn carriages shared the existing infrastructure. Eventually, for some societies, new systems developed and merged into a new, cohesive infrastructure. In these societies, the horse drawn carriage has become a quaint reminder of days gone by or a tourist novelty. In other societies, various modes of transport continue to share congested, poorly maintained roads. Not surprisingly, the productivity of these societies relates to the relative state of infrastructure. Our community and individual institution decisions regarding digital repositories and infrastructure development will have profound implications in the future. There are emerging developments in data-intensive scholarship across a range of disciplines that might represent the inflection point in terms of transformation. While much of the attention in this regard has focused on science and engineering, there are notable developments in the social sciences and humanities as well that highlight a shift from a collection-centric view to a data-centric view. This data-intensive scholarship is illuminating fundamental changes in the nature of publication, research, education, and outreach that will challenge our assumptions about digital repositories. Ultimately, repositories may be most appropriately cast as one of many systems in an overall infrastructure that will support new forms of scholarship. This presentation will highlight activities from the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries’ data curation program that includes the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Virtual Observatory, and the Roman de la Rose Digital Library.
Shawn Martin, Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Pennsylvania
Institutional Repository Personality Disorder: How do we cure it?
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a ?personality disorder is ?an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it.? Lately, Institutional Repositories (IRs) seem to be going through a bit of a personality disorder. On the one hand, the Harvard mandate has made IRs and open access an essential component of information infrastructure. On the other hand, established IRs have suffered from relatively low deposit rates and are searching for relevancy among scholars who often do not see IRs as aiding their work. Clearly, faculty see the importance of open access, but do not seem to see the importance of IRs as they exist now. So, how should IRs conform to both library principles and faculty expectations? The University of Pennsylvania Library already has a long established institutional repository (ScholarlyCommons@Penn) with over 10,000 papers and articles. We are also adding services in addition to the IR. Most recently, we added SelectedWorks, a service that allows faculty to build personal research webpages. Finally, we are working on building an architecture to serve all of our digital libraries at Penn. What does this have to do with IRs? In my view, it is essential to view all of these initiatives going on at Penn as part of a larger scholarly communication infrastructure. Interestingly, faculty at Penn have shown a much greater interest in creating personal web pages than they have in depositing in the IR. Also, they have expressed significant interest in using the IR to create electronic journals, neither of these functions are really what the IR was designed to do. Up to now, IRs have generally been promoted in three ways. First, IRs are an archive of work that will be preserved forever, much in the way that print libraries exist now. Second, IRs are a way of marketing individual departments and showing others the research within the department. Third, IRs are a way of reclaiming intellectual property from an increasingly expensive journal subscription system. All of these are compelling reasons, yet none of them particularly compelling to scholars. Though they certainly care about these issues, they care more about tenure, promotion, and general dissemination of their scholarship. Hence IRs need to take on those roles in order to make themselves more relevant. At Penn, we are actively trying to add services like personal web pages, hosting, peer review, journal publishing, and the like to our own IR. We are also engaging in a long term project to assess what our faculty want from an electronic scholarly communication system. It is essential that IRs seek treatment and create an enduring pattern of behavior that conforms both to library expectations and faculty needs. Instead of being a large depository of digital articles, IRs need to be an active part of a larger picture and a vehicle that allows faculty to research and disseminate their scholarship more effectively.
Jennifer Campbell-Meier, Doctoral Student, University of Hawaii
Storytelling and Institutional Repositories
Accessing and preserving the scholarly output of an institution benefits all involved. However, faculty members are often slow to submit materials and develop repository collections. Denning (2001) identifies storytelling as a way transmit new concepts within an organization, enhancing or changing an individual?s perceptions of change by supplementing abstract analysis. The use of a ?springboard story? is provided to listeners as a visualization tool. The story provides a framework for individuals to contextualize change. In developing an institutional repository, the library is moving from a passive storehouse of scholarly communication, to a proactive publisher. The Internet is changing the role of the library and the way its users access information. By asking ?what does our library do?? librarians may develop a story that articulates the change internally: it can be used to create support for an institutional repository and develop goals. Stories can both encourage acceptance and promote understanding within an organization. The stories can be beneficial to librarians, who get feedback about the process and how individual faculty members are using the IR. Using data collected during case study interviews with the developers of six institutional repositories and three discipline repositories in the United States and Canada, the presentation identifies the stories that can be associated with IR development and the conversational triggers for librarians to use while marketing a repository.
VALUE-ADDED USER SERVICES
Dr. Joan Giesecke / Dr. Paul Royster, Dean of Libraries / Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Value-Adding Services Bundled through an Institutional Repository: A Successful Model
During its 3 years of operations, the institutional repository at the University of Nebraska?Lincoln has gathered and posted over 14,000 documents, which together with its hosted ETD collection make it the country?s 4th largest IR. Usage records also indicate it is one of the busiest, as well, furnishing almost 100,000 downloads during the most recent month (April 2008). The IR has also become the cornerstone for a bundle of electronic publishing services developed and provided by the UNL Libraries. Indeed, these services may be seen as the enablers or preconditions of the IR?s successful track record.
To facilitate and accelerate faculty uptake and participation in the IR, services are provided to supplement the ?traditional? self-archiving model. We call it our ?Do It For Me? model, and the terms are basically: send us your publications list, and we will do the rest. The IR staff does article collection, permissions clearing, scanning, preparation of author versions (including typesetting and proofing), and ultimately mediated deposit. More than 90% of the faculty articles in the IR have been acquired via this model. Mediated deposit also allows for greater consistency in metadata, file sizes and data integrity, quality control, and copyright/permissions compliance. We also seek and solicit previously unpublished works?of any length?to be issued as original publications. Works that demonstrate strong demand in electronic form, where eligible, can be re-purposed as on-demand printed works, available for sale through a 3rd-party vendor. The IR also promotes itself as an archival hosting service for document collections, periodical series, and conference proceedings.
Finally, there are services that provide a "running re-sale" to stimulate interest and increase satisfaction among depositors. Our IR provides regular monthly usage reports and usage analysis to depositors; and this has proved immensely useful in increasing submissions from authors and co-authors, who are impressed with the numbers of downloads their articles receive. In order to maintain the relatively high levels of usage (the current average is over 7 downloads per month per article), the IR practices search engine optimization?by creating full and search-term-laden abstracts and by placing links on appropriate external websites. The presentation will discuss best practices for content recruitment and document preparation, policies and implementation, staffing requirements, and software customization and design. Finally, the program will consider the central role of the library?s IR in an overall campus strategy for scholarly communication and publication.
Hideki Uchijima, Librarian, Kanazawa University Library
A usage-centered approach to the promotion of institutional
The Digital Repository Federation(DRF) is a collaborative initiative by librarians in Japanese universities to improve scholarly Communication by promoting over 50 institutional repositories they have launced and managed since 2004. It has shared the basic idea that the enhancement of usage of the contents on repositories is the key to the sustainable future of institutionally supported digital repositories, believing that evidence that repositories are being used is more important than mere advocacy and mandates. By "users of repositories," we mean those on the internet who are potentially and actually interested in the content on the repositories rather than the members of campus community. We report four successful innovative attempts at valued-added service that has focused on the enhancement of usage.
The AIRways Project, initiated and operated by Hokkaido University's library, has aimed at an integration of the increased findability of preprints/postprints on the repositories with the library service of OpenURL resolvers, which normally stops short of repository metadata. With the AIRways knowledge-base available to resolvers, you have only to wait for the resolver to guide you to the author's full text on the repository, while you normally would have to use, say, OAIster's metadata or just visit Google Scholar to search for open access version of articles. It has been verified by the repositories's logging data that the AIRways system works efficiently with most of currently commercially available resolvers, and in fact increased accesses to repository-loaded articles. The DRF has promoted the integration of repository service nd conventional interlibrary service. From users' point of view, both are means to obtain documents they need. Japanese univerity system still appreciates the tradition of self-publishing in print and exchanging by schools and departments of their faculty's achievements in the national language, but with institutional repositories loaded with such achievements, you must not fill ILL requests with photocopies, but redirect it to repository contents. Good communication between ILL librarians and repository managers, suggested by DRF, resulted in the increased use of repositories in exchange for the decreased number of filled requests for article photocopies. Timely loading of research articles has proved paramountly significant in terms of usage.
Kyoto Univerity Library has been alert enought to progresses in thier research community to quickly approach a professor whose article published in Cell was picked up by the popular newspapers, and to suggest to him that he self-archive the article on its repository. As a result, there was a steep rise in the usage of the repository, which resulted in increased awareness of the need for the university repository. Not only technical innovations but also managerically arranged systematic preparation for this kind of occasion has been among the DRF's focuses for value adding service. For usage to mean anything, its record must be reliable, and comparable across different repositories. It has to be no less accurate than publisher-provided COUNTER compliant download reports. DRF has established a pretty much standardized methods of usage metrics for repositories across different platform systems in the contemporary environment of crawlers and federated searches.
Norbert Lossau, DRIVER
DRIVER: Open Access to Information through Digital Repository Networks in Europe and Worldwide
All research institutions in Europe and worldwide should make all their research publications openly accessible through institutional repositories. In order to support this vision DRIVER is creating a Confederation of well informed content providers and building a sustainable infrastructure of digital repositories, comprising content and services. Advanced and modular technology is connecting physically distributed institutional repositories to one, large-scale, virtual Knowledge Base of European and global research. Deployment of the infrastructure can be manifold and is open to service providers of all kinds.
DRIVER is carried by an EC-co-funded consortium of content providers and technical infrastructure developers, comprising twelve partners from ten European countries. Already in its organisational and technical conception DRIVER has been open to connect to Digital Repository networks outside of Europe. Ultimately, repositories from Europe and all continents should be connected. DRIVER is therefore seeking early collaboration with international repository communities from other continents. Contacts have already been established to the United States, Latin America, China, Japan, India and Africa.
By joining the DRIVER community, research institutions all over the world can become part of a state-of-the-art community-drive infrastructure. The presentation provides an overview of what the benefits are of becoming part of the DRIVER community. It focuses on the project achievements and lays out a strategy on the future information infrastructure based on open access repositories.
4:00 – 6:30PM: Innovation Fair and Reception
• Aaron Birkland, National Science Digital Library - Using Fedora 3.0 CMA for the NSDL NCORE
• Alex Wade, Microsoft Corporation - My Research: A cloud-based personal repository on every desktop
• Allyson Mower, University of Utah - The University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System
• Alvin Hutchinson, Smithsonian Institution – Libraries’ Institutional Bibliography: Using Tools to Circumvent Depositor Reluctance
• Bill Branan, Fedora Commons - Web 2.0 on Fedora
• Brenda Burk, IUPUI University Library - Streamlining the submissions
• Chris Wilper, Fedora Commons - Using Amazon S3 for Fedora Repository File Storage
• Eddie Shin, Fedora Commons - APP, SWORD, and ORE with the Fedora Repository
• Guy McGarva & Robin Rice, University of Edinburgh - Two standards-compliant ways to geo-reference objects in DSpace repositories
• Sean Thomas, MIT - SIMILE Project’s Citeline: A new tool for bibliography publishing on the Web
• Marianne Buehler, Rochester Institute of Technology - Harvest a College’s Scholarship?
• Marilyn Billings, University of Massachusetts, Amherst - Negotiating with Publishers for Author Rights
• Catherine Mitchell, University of California - Keywords in Context
• Mary Betts-Gray & John Harrington, Cranfield University - Show your True Colors Advocacy Campaign
• Tomonari Kinto, University of Tsukuba - SCPJ project: Promoting Japanese scholarly societies’ understanding of open access
• Plato Smith II, Florida State University - P 3 D: Publishing, Publicizing, & Preserving Diatomscapes???
• Rhonda Marker, Rutgers University - Repository Faculty Tools
• Shane Beers, George Mason University - Electronic Theses and Dissertations: An interdepartmental approach
• Sue Kunda, Oregon State University - Scanning for Success: Oregon State University Libraries’ Digitization Program
Tuesday, November 17
THE POLICY ENVIRONMENT
David Prosser, Executive Director, SPARC Europe
One of the most remarkable developments in scholarly communication over the past ten years has been the increasingly interest in access issues by policy makers. In particular, open access (in the form of both self-archiving and open access journals) has sparked the imagination of politicians, funding bodies, and university administrators. The debate has moved out of the library and publisher communities to take a more central place in discussions of the ‘knowledge economy’, return on investment in research, and the nature of e-science. This presentation will discuss some of the policy drivers that are impacting on scholarly communications and describe the major policy initiatives within Europe that are supporting a move to open access.
Syun Tutiya, Chiba University, Japan
Bonnie Klein, Defense Technology Information Center, USA
U.S. Federal Government Repositories & Public Access to Grant Research
CENDI (wwww.cendi.org) is an interagency working group of 13 U.S. federal agency libraries and information centers that manage scientific, technical and medical (STM) information resulting from over 97% of the U.S. research and development budget. Klein will discuss public access to the STM content available from the CENDI repositories and via their collaboration in www.science.gov. She will specifically focus on laws, regulations, policies and practices that affect dissemination of federally-funded grant research.
CAMPUS PUBLISHING STRATEGIES
Rea Devakos, Coordinator, Scholarly Communication Initiatives, University of Toronto
Building in uncertain times: news from the Great White North
Libraries are increasingly providing pared down digital publishing services, partly in response to the changing scholarly communication landscape. At the same time, questions are being asked about the viability, scope and prestige of library publishing. Will libraries be destined to “publish lite” or can we define sustainable, credible and constructive services? Consortia and strategic alliances have often been used to build capacity, contain costs and foster collaboration. Can library publishing benefit?
Partnerships bring scale, persistence, resources and diversity of skills and contexts to bear. Partnerships may also increase complexity and conflict. Synergies is a multiple institution and stakeholder project that will not only develop a range of publishing tools, but also expand the role of Canadian universities in supporting scholars’ dissemination needs, today and into the future.
This talk will outline the project with an emphasis on implications for individual institutions and consortiums. The Public Knowledge Project and the Ontario region will be used as case studies in cooperation.
Catherine Mitchell, Director, eScholarship Publishing Group, California Digital Library
Let's Stop Talking About Repositories: A Study in Perceived Use-Value, Communication and Publishing Services
What does it mean for an institutional repository to be “successful”? Often, it seems, the single metric for establishing repository success is magnitude: the total number of objects deposited within the repository and the usage rate of those materials by end users.
By this measure, the eScholarship Repository of the California Digital Library could be deemed successful. With over 7 million full-text downloads and more than 25,000 scholarly papers (working papers, pre-prints, post-prints, born-digital journals and monographs) voluntarily deposited since its inception in 2002, this open access institutional repository has clearly gotten some traction within the University of California.
And yet, as a proportion of the total number of scholarly articles generated by UC faculty within a given year (more than 26,000), not to mention the gray literature, the eScholarship Repository’s holdings barely scratch the surface of the scholarship being generated at UC’s ten campuses.
Why? Recent surveys at UC reveal to us that very few of our faculty have heard of the eScholarship Repository. Even those who have some familiarity with the name often lack a clear understanding of the publishing and research services to be found there. These same surveys suggest that, although UC faculty are eager to have their research disseminated broadly, that eagerness does not translate into a commitment to the institutional repository. Rather than taking up the mantle of open access publishing advocacy, most UC faculty are primarily engaged in traditional publishing models that ensure their individual advancement within traditional structures of tenure and promotion.
Armed with these data, we have begun rethinking the way we talk about the eScholarship Repository. In fact, we’ve begun thinking that perhaps we shouldn’t talk about the “repository” at all. Instead, we have embarked on a new campaign to efface the repository as such and, instead, raise the visibility of the university-wide publishing services supported by the repository – that is, to identify the gaps within the scholarly workflow where the CDL can offer compelling solutions and to “market” those solutions to the faculty at large. With this approach, the deposit of papers into our repository becomes no longer an end in itself but rather a by-product of a much more flexible and relevant publishing services model that can support everything from born digital journals, monographs and working papers to disciplinary collections, archives, and conference proposal and proceedings management.
This talk will focus on the CDL’s current, three-pronged effort to articulate and provide innovative digital publishing services to the UC community at large. Beginning with a demo of the dramatic overhaul of eScholarship’s publishing and access interfaces, I will then explore the particulars of our explicit outreach and marketing campaign to the campuses (a campaign that necessarily focuses on unique categories of users – by discipline, by rank, by depositor/end user status) and end with a discussion of the exciting developments in our recent efforts to establish and implement a shared services model publishing program with the University of California Press. Throughout this discussion, I will consider how the very notion of the “success” of a repository must be embedded in an awareness of its own irrelevance. In other words, a repository is merely a platform. Its success lies not in its population of objects but rather in its ability to serve the research and teaching needs of its scholarly communities. If that means that we stop talking about “repositories” altogether, so much the better.
Teresa Fishel and Janet Sietmann, Library Director/DigitalCommons Project Manager, Macalester College
Showcasing Student, Faculty, and Campus Publications: Promoting, Populating, and Publishing in a Small Liberal Arts College IR
Institutional repositories are more than just a place to deposit faculty pre-prints, post-print, and OA articles. IRs offer colleges and universities an opportunity to showcase student senior theses, award winning papers, and student peer-reviewed journals. We have also found that IRs can provide a means of distributing campus publications in an open access environment. What began as a solution for managing student honor theses has expanded to include three student peer-reviewed journals, a campus alumni publication, and the entire series of publications for our Institute for Global Citizenship. Using the bepress software in DigitalCommons, the Macalester College library has taken on an expanding role in providing a platform for disseminating campus publications.
Our presentation focuses on our work in promoting, populating, and now publishing in a small liberal arts college environment. We discuss planning, policy, and sustainability issues. We begin by sharing our experiences in providing open access for student honor theses and some of the challenges we encountered as well as challenges in developing policies that were mindful of copyright both for the student authors and for potential users. We will discuss how our efforts to populate our institutional repository, led to discovering new opportunities to work with faculty on student peer reviewed publications which led to the collaboration in publishing a traditionally print journal in our open access environment. These efforts led to the development of a born-digital journal, Studies in Mediterranean Antiquities and Classics. We have continued to expand the collections culminating in posting the entire collection of journals for the Institute of Global Citizenship as a result of our Digital Project Manager articulating the benefits of OA.
In addition to providing insights to our challenges and small successes, increasing visibility for campus publications with successful results will be demonstrated with some brief statistics. We hope to demonstrate that our underlying philosophy is that one of the new roles for academic libraries of all sizes will be to become a publisher on campus. Our presentation will provide a roadmap for others who are in the initial stages of exploring the development of an institutional repository.