The Promise of Institutional Repositories : Scholars’ Bank at the University of Oregon Carol Hixson Head, Metadata and Digital Library Services University of Oregon Libraries https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/dspace/handle/1794/

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu This is our site which we’ve named Scholars’ Bank. We use DSpace software. The site has been up in test since April 2003 and in production since about January 2004.

History Initial Vision Faculty content Self-submission Buy-in to open access model We started out with a very typical vision for our repository, the same vision that is hard coded into the DSpace software: that we would be archiving faculty work that they would submit themselves. We also assumed they would understand implicitly and support the open-access model. Although we haven’t abandoned this vision, we have modified and expanded it quite a lot and that is where the University of Oregon has found success.

First Eight Months In the first 8 months that Scholars’ Bank existed (May-December 2003), we had succeeded in acquiring only 93 items. 12% of those were from the library, in the form of library staff articles or presentations or finding aids. 11% were faculty items from a faculty member who was the spouse of one of the IR group members. 5% were faculty and student papers from the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management. The vast majority were Economic department working papers, after we secured permission from the editor to harvest the backfile of papers from the RePec disciplinary archive. After 8 months of extensive work talking to individual faculty members trying to interest them in the archive and getting at best a lukewarm response and almost no follow through from those faculty who did express an interest, we realized that something had to change, if we wanted to create a viable and useful repository.

Cultural Challenges Intellectual Property Concerns Authenticity of Submissions Concern over quality Concern over control Terminology Technophobia We’ve found that we face a lot of challenges in building and sustaining our IR. I would characterize the cultural challenges as: Intellectual Property Concerns Will putting my material in the archive damage my relationships with my publishers? How can I protect my content from being stolen or used inappropriately? Authenticity of Submissions From the graduate school, how do we know that the students are submitting the same version of their dissertation that was approved by their review committee? Concern over quality Campus admin was concerned over having an institutional stamp put on content that was not centrally approved Concern over control Faculty were concerned that Campus admin would try to control what they put in Terminology Nobody understood repository, so we refer to it as an archive, which they do understand Institutional conjured up negative connotations from Campus Admin and faculty so we avoid talking about that, as well Technophobia Some people have limited experience with computer systems and are put off by anything that is new technologically

Technical Challenges Submission template Metadata Version control and revision User Interface Preservation Some of the technical challenges related to DSpace software are: Submission template which can’t be modified easily for individual collections without modifying the code Metadata hardcode labels with library jargon and lack of support for controlled terms Version control and revision Inability of individual users to replace or update their files User Interface Search interface is rudimentary Preservation Challenge faced for all of our digital content, not just that in our IR

Practical Challenges Time Money Identification of content and communities Acquisition of content Practical challenges that we’ve encountered: Time Lack of faculty time to think about or do anything new that doesn’t lead to an immediate benefit Lack of our time to pursue all the probable content Money Mostly translating into our staff support for mediating most of the submissions Identification of content and communities Difficulty of finding out who is producing what and identifying the right people to talk to about it Acquisition of content Simply getting it in – 95% of ours was mediated by the library

Strategies Develop local context Explain the global context Get attractive content Publicize Improve the service I’ll talk briefly about each of these.

Local context We’ve developed a lot of supplementary pages that are linked here off our home page for the site that provide local context for the archive.

Local context Provide a general overview without jargon Personalize the information Answer questions of local interest Build in redundancy Provide varying levels of detail Educate on issues and link to broader movement The local context we provide employs the following principles, which I’ll elaborate on a bit.

Provide a general overview We naturally provide a general overview of the archive, the services we offer through it, and what people can expect from it.

Personalize the information We’ve created a number of pages that try to put the information in terms that will have meaning for particular groups of users, such as faculty or students.

Questions of local interest We have learned what many of the questions and concerns of our local users are and have prepared an FAQ as one way to provide some of the information they’re most frequently interested in.

Build in redundancy We try to provide the same information in different formats throughout the archive. This is one of the primary areas of concern for faculty that we also address in the FAQ.

Varying amount of detail We try to introduce topics broadly and succinctly and then provide links to more detailed information. The link pointed to here opens up a step-by-step guide to self-submission, showing screen shots of the submission process and providing general guidance on how to fill in the submission template.

Educate about issues On the top page of Scholars’ Bank, I provide links out to some items of interest about the global open access movement. Again, there is more detailed information for anyone who wants to know more.

SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php This site is a key spot for starting a discussion with faculty about their rights. Everytime I talk with individuals or groups, there is great interest in this site. It alerts faculty to the fact that they do have the right to investigate and negotiate their rights with publishers and several faculty have recently re-acquired rights to their content because of the information we provided them.

Link to broader movement We register the IR in appropriate registries, such as OAISter and the Institutional Archives Registry. This screen shows a Scholars’ Bank item retrieved through OAIster, where we’ve registered the archive.

Publicize Promote anywhere and everywhere Use subject specialists in the effort Share success stories Link to documents from the catalog Work with known allies These are some of the specific ways we try to publicize the archive.

Promotion Inside Oregon is a biweekly web-based publication for the campus that we’ve been harvesting for many months now. After we started harvesting the issues, there was an article on Scholars’ Bank in the next issue – providing us widespread publicity on campus about the effort. There are many other examples I could show you but won’t in the interest of time.

Use subject specialists One of the ways we try to identify potential communities on campus is through the work of our subject librarians. This community was one that was established thanks to the efforts of the Head of our Architecture and Allied Arts Library.

Share success stories One of our Ph.D. candidates submitted her dissertation herself, in spite of lack of support from the Grad School. A few weeks later, a journal editor was searching Google for information on her topic, found her submission in Scholars’ Bank, contacted her and asked her to write an article based on her research. She has done up a testimonial which we now have added as part of our context for the archive.

Share success stories I had the student (who also works for me) do up a testimonial that is now part of our contextual information in the archive. She has just secured an adjunct teaching position on campus this fall. She credits Scholars’ Bank with helping to jumpstart her career as an academic.

Link to materials From catalog We also catalog journal titles and selected monographs deposited in the IR and we link to the SB version from the library catalog. This alerts our local users about the title and the archive, and it also alerts users of WorldCat to the archive, since those links appear in WorldCat records, too.

Improvements to the service Full text Provide use statistics Modify the submissions template Sub-communities Create links between collections There are a number of improvements to the service that we have implemented or are preparing to implement. I don’t have time to talk about all of them but can answer specific questions on these and other topics at another time. We run a cron job every night to provide full-text indexing of the files that have been added that day. Full-text indexing is one of the big selling points for some of our contributors who already maintain web sites for the content. I’ll show you just a bit about some of the other points listed here.

Statistics These are stats we gather from the Webalizer program about the use of the archive. This allows us to collect a wide variety of information about the use of our site. Since we started tracking this in December 2004, we’ve been visited almost 2 million times.

Statistics The new version of DSpace which we’ve just installed provides the ability to track on usage of individual titles and we’ve modified the code a bit to allow it to show the actual titles, rather than just the handle (URL) which is what it does out of the box. We’re going to be making these stats publicly available within the next couple of months.

Further improvements to the service Digitizing documents Support and investigation of copyright Implementing Creative Commons licenses Modify the user interface and develop searching guides Contribute further to code developments These are some of the areas where we are working to further improve the archive, some of which we have done already and others that are just being planned.

Rethinking and Restructuring Expand definition of “Scholarly output” Faculty output Individual and group work (journals) Library collections Electronic records of the University Finding aids Articles, presentations, etc. Campus publications Newsletters Planning documents Student works Theses and dissertations Special projects Research interest groups Miscellaneous Our definition has expanded so that materials deposited in the archive are either themselves scholarly or else support the University’s scholarly mission. That has enabled us to go after a broader range of content, much of which would not otherwise be archived – or not effectively and reliably archived.   we came to realize that it is not a panacea for the scholarly communication crisis but could become a part of a new model.

Type of material Scholars’ Bank now has almost 1200 items in it, and the breakdown of the types of material in it looks very different from the way we expected it to look when we got started. We have quite a variety of content and I’ll show you just a couple examples that i think have been important for us here.

Faculty output UO, like MIT, Rochester, and some others, have begun to create individual collections for faculty members. Research. We have created five new collections like this in the past 2 months.

Campus publications In addition to newsletters and journals produced or edited on campus, we are also archiving campus planning documents in the archive.

Student work We have a lot of varied student content in Scholars’ Bank, all sponsored by academic departments or programs. This one is of particular interest in that it archives the research papers for a particular Honors College class. It is connected to an archive of the digitized primary source materials that the students used for their research. This is a unique collaboration that has tied us in to the instructional programs of the campus in unique ways.

Student work This is another unique student collection where the library has established a competitive undergraduate research award, the recipients of which are expected to archive their winning research in the archive. We hope to begin influencing the next generation of faculty to consider such archives as a normal part of their professional lives. We’re also working with a sponsor to establish something comparable for faculty.

Growth over time As of today, there are 1182 titles in Scholars’ Bank. This chart shows that the greatest number of submissions has occurred in the past nine months months, reflecting our expanded vision for the archive and the various strategies we have developed. 78% of the content has been acquired in the last nine months. Hits against the archive have increased 224% in the same time period, with searchers coming in from all over the world – more than 70 countries. We have a backlog of content waiting to be added with more interest being expressed from all over the campus.

Collaborative opportunities Share information http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~chixson/gwla-ir/ Share strategies Develop federated search of our repositories Develop shared collections We have already begun to take advantage of some of these opportunities. There is an archived listserve for GWLA members interested in discussing IR groups. Through this and other means we can share information and strategies. Down the road, we could also develop a federated search of our different repositories or possibly even collaborate to build a shared repository. When I was in Barcelona last week I was introduced to a shared repository that they have set up for different institutions in Catalonia using DSpace software.

Contact information Carol Hixson Head, Metadata and Digital Library Services University of Oregon Libraries chixson@darkwing.uoregon.edu (541) 346-3064