The Institutional Repository Toolbox How to successfully implement an institutional repository Ninth Southern African Online Information Meeting 3 – 5 June 2008 Presented by ina.smith@up.ac.za More and more South African institutions are starting to implement digital repositories. These repositories are used to collect, disseminate, manage, preserve, and index their digitally born and non-digitally born assets. Currently there are 11 South African repositories listed on the Registry of Open Access Repositories and openDOAR. A digital repository offers many advantages. In addition to preserving intellectual output in digital format for years to come, it can also help improve the visibility, usage and impact of research conducted at your institution on the world out there.  

Tools for setting up an Institutional Repository Setting up a digital repository can be challenging. Although there are many resources available on the web and elsewhere, people often do not have the time and other resources to study and research the vast amount of information available out there. The solution we came up with was to design an institutional repository toolbox, which contains the most important tools needed to implement a repository within a South African institution. This toolbox has been populated with document templates, document examples and links to other useful information – from business plans to policies on copyright, preservation, digitization and more. What I would like to do this morning is to quickly share with you a couple of important tools needed to successfully set up a digital repository at your institution.

Strategize What helped and guided us during the implementation of our repository was the fact that the library had an e-strategy that was and still is aligned with the organizational strategy. The successful implementation of the repository in 2006 was just one of many achievements of the previous e-strategy. But you can implement and make a success of your repository without having an e-strategy. The only difference would be that it might be harder to convince people and get their buy-in in the various processes involved.

Analyze the needs of your organization The best place to start would be through conducting a formal needs analysis or needs assessment. In order to address the very unique needs of your client group or scholarly community, you first need to know what exactly their needs are. Universities and research libraries around the world use repositories in different ways, for example to archive and host scholarly communication, to store learning material and courseware, for electronic publishing, to manage collections of research documents, to preserve digital material for the long term, for knowledge management, for housing digitized collections, etc. A successful needs assessment includes both informal and formal means of surveying your community: Informal surveys might include face to face meetings with individual academics and administrators; e-mail contacts, and monitoring existing web-based publishing services on campus. Formal surveys might include paper-based or online surveys of academics and staff, as well as formal presentations and Q&A sessions with departments and academic groups. When conducting a needs analysis, ask questions such as 1. How are scholarly works currently published or stored on campus? 2. What IT resources are available on campus? 3. What are academic perceptions of the issues and problems of managing digital materials? Compile the questions you plan to ask in advance, and make use of a checklist when conducting the survey. In the end you can consolidate all the info gathered into one document to better understand how academics publish and how they might use an institutional repository at your institution.

Evaluate various software products Once you know what needs to address you can start investigate available software. When choosing a software platform for your IR, consider not just your current needs but try to envisage how your service might look ten or fifteen years from now. Ask questions such as What types of content do you think you might need to host, How might the volume of submissions grow as the adoption curve rises etc. You may not have the answers to these questions today. But consider these questions as you investigate software solutions to meet your current and anticipated needs. There are mainly two categories, the one being proprietary and the other open source software platforms. If you prefer proprietary software, you will be looking at ContentDM or ProQuest Digital Commons. If you are in the market for open source, then you can choose between Fedora, DSpace, ePRints, Greenstone, bepress, CDSware, Open Repository and a couple of others. Each IR platform has unique strengths. Your choice of an IR system depends entirely on the unique needs of your institution. Once you have evaluated the software according to an evaluation instrument based on your needs analysis, you can make your decision. A literature survey can also form part of your evaluation. Also visit software implementations by other institutions to get a feel for the scope, quality and ease of use for the end-user, and if you have the capacity and resources, you can even try out the various products available on the market. Some commercial vendors also offer trial periods.

Do some planning Drawing up a service plan or a business plan or business case will help you focus the service you will offer, identify your strengths and weaknesses, key areas where you need to develop expertise and the financial risk involved in setting up your repository. It will at the same time generate enough interest from important decision makers and role players to make them want to have a repository implemented. Describe what kind of service you will be offering. For example, some universities build their institutional repository to hold only academic research. Others expand the service definition to include student theses, learning materials, or university records. Ideally, you want to decide this before you build the technical infrastructure of your institutional repository. Also include an implementation timeline, address staffing, hardware, software, financial issues, roles and responsibilities, the information model you plan to apply, and include a marketing plan.

Develop, Design & Install your repository Once you have the approval of your library management or the relevant parties, you can continue with the installation of the software. Like mentioned earlier, there are many products available on the market. You don’t need to design the repository from scratch. Open source products such as ePrints, Greenstone and DSpace are ready to use out of the box without having to change a thing.

Evaluate your repository It is recommended that you first test ideas within a test environment. First install the software on a developmental server, then a quality assurance server and finally on a production server. Get a group of people together – prospective end-users as well as cataloguers, subject librarians, specialists such as a metadata specialist if you have one, and IT people. Provide them with an evaluation instrument or checklist to guide them, but also encourage them to freely contribute on how the system should be adapted or improved to address the needs of clients at your institution.

Find prospective buyers For Sale What also worked well for us was to start small. We initially identified 4 champion collections to work with. Therefore – try to first run a pilot programme for your institutional repository service. Through this pilot programme you can then get a few early adopters on board. Also use them to evaluate and test the software and convince them to join the programme early on. This will help you to iron out procedures, and field test your policies and assumptions before launching the service to the entire university.

Implement your repository Once the early adopters are convinced and have successfully started to contribute, showcase what they’ve done to others and demonstrate the benefits to others.

Roles & workflow Running this kind of service requires teamwork. It is a shared responsibility between all role players to make a success of this repository. The IR Manager has primary responsibility for managing the repository and supporting the community of users. You will also need an IT manager that will be responsible for all aspects of the technical functioning of the repository. Other role players include Submitters (research assistants, academics, librarians), Reviewers (subject experts or subject librarians), Metadata Editors (Cataloguers) and Collection Administrators (Subject librarians). It is also recommended to have a dedicated metadata specialist, digitization specialist and copyright officer on board.

Policies & Standards For others to trust your repository and the content on your repository, you need to play by the rules. Your repository needs to be OAI-PMH Compliant. What this means is that metadata on your repository should be open for harvesting and indexing by other harvesters and search engines such as Google and Google Scholar. Also – like Derek mentioned yesterday - don’t make the publishers mad. Check publishers policies on self-archiving on the Sherpa Romeo web page, and if the publishers don’t have policies yet, contact them directly. In addition to some international standards, each university or institution also needs to research and write their own policies and regulations on copyright and intellectual property, preservation, open access, metadata etc. What will be helpful here is to get together a Policy Advisory Group that can play an advisory role in the decision making process. Keep on revisiting your policy as new needs arrive and as you grow in experience. Also be prepared to change your policies as the repository matures.

Sell the idea One of the biggest challenges will be to get people to start contributing to your repository. Use success stories, quotations from academics. Jump-start a successful service as a demonstrator. Keep in close contact with existing communities for example through a mailing list. Having a persistent identifier for their research is the single best selling point for an institutional repository when talking with academics. Use the term visibility in addition to open access – it is a softer term and for some, more easily understood. Success doesn’t always follow immediately. Your marketing efforts will pay off eventually. Academics have to hear about your institutional repository service many times, over a period of time, and from several sources. A good rule of thumb is that someone needs to have been exposed to your service seven times before they are fully aware of your service. Be sure to explicitly outline the benefits of your service to academics. Easy sells – that is, showing individual academics how easy it is to submit and find content. The easier it is for academics or departments to add content, the more likely they are to do so. Target some top and prominent researchers on campus – getting them on board early to leverage their interest in the service. Even if it means that you will have to do all the submissions initially just to convince them. Also work along with the research office and webmasters on campus, get their buy-in and get them to redirect members with needs that can be addressed by the repository, to you. Identify opportunities to address community members e.g. research meetings, web meetings, faculty meetings, departmental meetings, contribute to the campus newsletter, schedule a kick-off event at the library and invite important roleplayers, offer presentations on and off campus, host sessions on topics of interest to academics and which are relates to institutional repositories, e.g. on copyright, intellectual property rights, open access, etc. Keep subjects librarians informed, so that they can in turn inform their clients. Host open sessions at the library during lunch hour – send invites to all community members via mailing list.

Provide training Each of the various groups within your community will need general exposure to this new service, its features, and why and how it can be used. In addition to the general training, you’ll also have to provide more specific training that applies to certain specialist areas, for example metadata training for cataloguers. Other librarians, academics and research assistants appointed by faculty might need training in adding content to the system. You can conduct face to face individual or group training sessions, make animated tutorials available on the web, compile pamphlets, provide a general contact e-mail address for inquiries, etc.

Register your repository Once your repository service is up and running, register it with international metadata harvesters such as OAISTER, with ROAR, openDOAR, Google and Google Scholar. Also increase the visibility of your IR by working with the web masters to create links from your organizational web pages, add an entry on your IR to Wikispace, join mailing lists and contribute to the open source community if you have implemented an open source product.

Communicate, Collaborate and Share with others In the spirit of open access and open source – please share your ideas and innovations, but don’t expect any money in return! We are after all moving in the same direction. In the end not only will library staff, your clients, and your organization benefit, but other institutions nationally and internationally will learn from you, and SA as a whole will benefit since we will be making our research visible and available to the rest of the world. Your reward will be gratitude from the party you helped out, and you will also learn a lot in the process.

Challenges You would often hear people say that IT and installing the software are not difficult. What is more difficult is to get people on board and to get them to collaborate. From library staff, to academics to publishers and copyright owners. According to the literature the problems and hurdles which implementation teams face in building a repository include the following: Academics are slow to adopt Providing for sustainability is difficult Developing policies are difficult and requires a lot of work and people that agree Managing intellectual property rights Getting University support Managing costs Digital preservation Identifying key stakeholders You won’t be necessarily able to avoid it – just be aware and prepared for when it happens.

Start populating your repository! Be prepared that there will be some obstacles in the way, but please don’t let that side-track or stop you. If you use the tips I have shared with you this morning, even if you initially have to do all the work yourself, success is guaranteed in the long term. Just go ahead and move forward by start populating your repository – depending on your service offering definition, clients, researchers or library staff can start submitting conference papers, technical reports, research articles, theses and dissertations, digital image collections, sound clips, video clips, datasets, and many more, and soon all will experience all the benefits of being part of such a project!

Questions. Visit: http://www. up. ac. za/dspace/ Join: irspace@kendy Questions? Visit: http://www.up.ac.za/dspace/ Join: irspace@kendy.up.ac.za Contact us: ina.smith@up.ac.za