1. Digging for buried treasure: strategies for promoting institutional repositories
ER&L 2010, Austin, TX
February, 2, 2010
Julie Arendt, Jonathan Nabe, Andrea Imre – Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Tara Baillargeon, Beth Turtle – Kansas State University

2. Digging for Buried Treasure: Strategies for Promoting Institutional Repositories
Julie Arendt
Andrea Imre
Jonathan Nabe
Electronic Resources and Libraries 2010
Austin, TX
February 2, 2010

3. SIUC facts
Morris facts
IR - live since Fall 2008
Platform: bepress digital commons
Staffing: Institutional Repository Implementation and Application Group = 3 librarians (nobody full time)
Content types:
Student work (ETDs, Research Papers, Honors Papers, Posters)
Faculty work (presentations, published articles, working papers, etc.)
University documentation (committee work, presentations)
Current holdings: over 1800 papers
Usage: over 27,500 full-text downloads to date

4. Purpose of marketing Overcome challenge of content recruitment
Copyright
Time constraints (authors, IR managers)
Major challenge for any IR is content recruitment
Copyright
Time
Marketing for more efficient content recruitment

5. 3 categories of SIUC PR activities
General, for a broader audience
High profile, one time, broad or targeted
Targeted, for specific audiences

6. Marketing strategies @ SIUC
Design elements of IR
Promotional material
Brochure
Handouts
submission guidelines
Author guide and help pages
Design elements : what’s in a name
Brochure: do not reinvent the wheel, borrow from others
quoting university administrator
cost
distribution (campus mail, and meetings)
Handouts to demonstrate ease of use
IR documentation, help pages, author pages with detailed info
Important tools when IR is started

7. Spreading the word Promotion within the Library (meetings, websites)
Promotion on campus
Media outlets (newspaper, radio, TV)
Links placed on university webpages
Meetings at multiple levels of the organization (administration, colleges, departments, special programs, research centers, individual faculty, etc.)
Library - meetings with staff, website links, website news item
Media – newspapers
radio, TV interviews with IR staff, also involve people on campus who are active users of the IR
Links on university websites
On campus – meetings, meetings, meetings

8. High profile one time events or activities
Forum
Survey
Open Access policy (or mandate, or resolution, etc.)

9. Catchy title
Prominent speaker
Local panel
Food!

12. Open Access Policy Use successful adopters’ language:
Harvard
Stanford
Kansas
MIT researchers/mit-faculty-open-access-policy/
Oregon State Libraries
Visit SPARC’s site:

13. Open Access Policy
Learn from others’ failure: University of Maryland’s experience cations/crlnews/2009/oct/pyrrhicvict.cfm

14. Liaison Training Session
Information about the repository, repository policies
Responses to frequently asked questions from faculty
Two requests
Deposit your stuff
Go forth and spread the word
Requirement for new hires
There are just three of us with other regular job duties. It would be challenging to reach every faculty member on our own.
Liaisons needed because
Greater numbers
Have contact already
BUT liaisons weren’t part of the development & have a broad range of knowledge about Institutional Repositories.

15. Liaison Materials Brochure Talking Points
Time NOT to reinvent the wheel – recycled materials
Reused materials that we already had developed.
Posted materials in OpenSIUC to make it easy for liaisons to access

16. Outreach Visits Liaison visits to department
With or Without Team members
Other units
Honors program
Graduate School
Ultimately the submissions are coming from the individuals who produce the materials, and one-on-one contact is important.
Liaison + Team member:
Automotive Technology – support of the chair was a big help
Content – Presentations (among the most popular downloads)
Honors program
Already had electronic versions of old theses & dissertations
Excitement about download level (example of Nazi experiment thesis)
Graduate school: Theses and Dissertations
Meeting with them to get it started. At this point only submission is voluntary not mandatory
ProQuest has provided copies for us to include – but we want author permissions to make them open access
We send s to recent grads to get permission

17. Maintaining the Flow Make it easy Keep in contact Download statistics
Solicit again
DigitalCommons automatically sends monthly download statistics to authors if they provide an address AND the submission had downloads that month. Demonstrates to authors that someone is reading it.
Submitting materials isn’t a regular part of faculty workflow. Even if they provide materials once, it won’t be the first thing on their minds when they publish something.

18. More information
Materials: