Institutional Repositories

Enhanced Publications: Linking Publications and Research Data in Digital Repositories

by Barbara Sierman

Emerging standards for enhanced publications and repository technology: survey on technology

by Barbara Sierman

Triumph, TF. (2012). Starting, Strengthening, and Managing Institutional Repositories by Jonathan A. Nabe.

by Therese Triumph

Repository Services for Students, Faculty, and Research Administration

by Susan Matveyeva

Presented at the Kansas Library Association Annual Conference, Wichita, KS, April 12, 2012

nstitutional repository services are a fast growing new academic library service. Unlike other library services... more nstitutional repository services are a fast growing new academic library service. Unlike other library services focused on delivering information created elsewhere, institutional repository services concentrate on collecting, organizing, and providing access to information created in the university or college that an academic library serves. Having students, faculty, and university / college administration as its stakeholders, the institutional repository develops services for each group. The presentation will provide a detailed description of major institutional repository programs and outlines a comprehensive and focused strategy for the institutional repository development. Based on experiences of a repository manager.

What's my name again? Sociotechnical considerations for author name management in research databases

by Rebecca Parker

Won best paper at OZCHI 2010.
Co-authored with Dana McKay and Silvia Sanchez; in Proceedings of 'Design interaction participation', the 22nd Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (OZCHI 2010), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 22-26 November 2010.

Managing names in bibliographic databases so that they have a one-to-one match with individual authors is a... more Managing names in bibliographic databases so that they have a one-to-one match with individual authors is a longstanding and complex problem. Various solutions have been proposed, from labour-intensive but accurate manual matching, to machine-learning approaches to automated matching which require little input from people, but are not perfectly accurate. Researchers have a particular interest in name management: they are often authors, and receive academic credit based on their work and need correct citation records. However they are also searchers and have an interest in finding all the works by other authors. There has been little work on the tensions between these two needs, nor on how researchers manage their own identities with their choices of name. This paper reports on a study of researchers that investigates both their relationships with their own names, and what they would like from research databases when they are searching for specific authors.

Beyond the Holy Grail: why academic librarianship is more than just reference (2008)

by Rebecca Parker

Paper presented at the 4th ALIA New Librarians Symposium (NLS4), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 05-06 December 2008

It’s easy to graduate from library school with the perception that all academic librarians spend their days behind a... more It’s easy to graduate from library school with the perception that all academic librarians spend their days behind a reference desk. Reference work is the primary focus of most information provision subjects and is held up as the exemplar of library services, the ‘holy grail’ of professional librarianship. Yet there are many other challenging quests that need the support of librarians in the academic library context. In the past there has been a tendency to focus almost exclusively on the information needs of students in the university environment, but academic libraries also serve a variety of other user groups central to the existence of universities and the advancement of research. By engaging with new areas of responsibility within universities, academic librarians step outside the traditional boundaries of librarianship and into new and exciting professional realms. Skills in information management and a detailed understanding of publication trends make librarians invaluable to universities for collecting and managing research outputs. Their support for open access publishing and institutional repositories puts academic librarians at the vanguard of the open access movement, a response to the desire for wider access to research than established scholarly publishing models allow. Increased research exposure benefits universities and individual academics, as it improves their research profiles both here and overseas. In this paper, I will show how the open access movement fosters opportunities for academic librarians to break down barriers to information access, while still actively serving researchers--and universities--who are often neglected as academic library users.

Building Swinburne Research Bank: an engaged, user-centred approach to content recruitment (2009)

by Rebecca Parker

Co-authored with Helen Wolff; appeared in Proceedings of the 14th ALIA Information Online Exhibition and Conference, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 20-22 January 2009

The now-defunct Research Quality Framework (RQF) required all Australian higher education facilities to create open... more The now-defunct Research Quality Framework (RQF) required all Australian higher education facilities to create open access institutional repositories for the storage and archival of university research outputs. Most universities followed the University of Southampton model of open access by pursuing mandates for authors to self-submit to their repositories. This well-established workflow places the onus for depositing research, managing copyright and creating metadata on authors, and as a consequence has typically achieved low contribution rates. Swinburne Research Bank repository managers have pursued a different, more involved, service model-bringing the repository to the researchers, rather than waiting for them to come to the repository. By maintaining responsibility for content sourcing, metadata creation, copyright permissions and deposit, Swinburne has been able to provide a more personalised service to its researchers. This model increases the workload for repository managers, but allows them to build valuable working relationships with individual researchers and research groups, and to gain access to a breadth of research material beyond the scope of HERDC requirements. This engaged, user-centred approach to content recruitment has seen high rates of contribution, and authors have even begun to actively contribute work for deposit. In this paper, we describe the rationale and outcomes of our unique approach, and propose a way forward for content recruitment in institutional repositories.

Partnerships at Swinburne (2009)

by Rebecca Parker

Co-authored with Teula Morgan; appeared in inCite, 30(9): 19-20

The role academic libraries perform for the corporate side of their institutions is usually much less public than... more The role academic libraries perform for the corporate side of their institutions is usually much less public than those provided to their most visible user groups: students and academics. This is starting to change. Swinburne Library is one of many Australian academic libraries managing an institutional repository---a digital collection of the university’s research publications designed to maximise their potential to be discovered online. Institutional repositories can achieve many admirable goals for librarians---they preserve digital assets into the future, address the problem of skyrocketing journal prices, facilitate open access to scholarly research, and provide a single point of entry to an institution’s entire body of research. For universities, though, the benefit of institutional repositories is more concrete. Information about a university’s research achievements made available online helps to attract student enrolments and funding for more research.

Lessons for data sharing from institutional repositories

by Rebecca Parker

Co-authored with Dana McKay and Terrence Bennett; in Proceedings of eResearch Australasia 2011, Melbourne, Australia, 06-10 November 2011.

Governments and institutions are increasingly interested in promoting open sharing of research data through... more Governments and institutions are increasingly interested in promoting open sharing of research data through institutional repositories: showcasing quality research data brings prestige to institutions and gives governments a visible return on financial investment in research and development. While the incentives for open data are clear for institutions and governments, any attempt to create an open data climate depends on the researchers who will choose to share their data (or not). Early attempts to foster an open data movement have met with little interest or action on the part of researchers, a result reminiscent of early attempts to recruit publications to institutional repositories. In this paper we draw on the institutional repositories literature to identify five major barriers to open data sharing: (dis)incentives, difficulty, danger, and existing disciplinary sharing practices. To change practice (and data sharing would be a major change for many disciplines), sufficient incentives must be in place to overcome old habits. There is currently little reward for researchers in data sharing: the risks are high and there are no research metrics available for measuring the impact of shared data. With so little incentive, the barrier to participation must be very low; however data sharing and curation are difficult at best. There are no standard ways to describe data, meaning cataloguing is taxing for both researchers and the repository librarians who would assist them. Not only is data sharing low-benefit and difficult, it is threatening to researchers: it may alienate their participants, and research data could be ill-used or misinterpreted. Finally, those who already share data in their own disciplines are unlikely to be willing to change their practice to meet institutional requirements: it is simply not worth it to them. The institutional repository literature highlights all these problems, and may even provide insight into some solutions.

What the library did next: strengthening our visibility in research support

by Rebecca Parker

In Proceedings of 'eM-powering eFutures', the 16th Biennial VALA Conference and Exhibition, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 06-09 February 2012

Academic libraries have a long and proud history of supporting teaching and learning in universities. However, there... more Academic libraries have a long and proud history of supporting teaching and learning in universities. However, there is growing recognition that supporting research in line with their universities' expectations requires new approaches and different skills from librarians. Many Australian university libraries are now appointing specialised research librarians to take on these challenges. In this paper, we show the scope for libraries to commit to developing new customer-focussed services for researchers that ensure the importance of the academic library to institutional research, while taking into account stakeholder needs and organisational expectations.

New evidence on the interoperability of information systems within UK universities

by Kathleen Menzies

Trends in Use of Scientific Workflows - Insights from a Public Repository and Recommendations for Best Practices

by Richard Littauer

"Co-authored with Bill Michener, Bertram Ludäscher, Karthik Ram, Rebeccea Koskela" "Published in IDCC 2011"

Scientific workflows are typically used to automate the processing, analysis, and management of scientific data. Most... more Scientific workflows are typically used to automate the processing, analysis, and management of scientific data. Most scientific workflow programs provide a user-friendly graphical user interface that enables scientists to more easily create and visualize complex workflows that may be comprised of dozens of processing and analytical steps. Furthermore, many workflows provide mechanisms for tracing provenance and methodologies that foster reproducible science. Despite their potential for enabling science, few studies have examined how the process of creating, executing, and sharing workflows can be improved. In order to promote open discourse and access to scientific methods as well as data, we analyzed a wide variety of workflow systems and publicly-available workflows on the public repository myExperiment. It is hoped that understanding the usage of workflows and developing a set of recommended best practices will lead to increased contribution of workflows to the public domain.

Typing OpenDLib Repository Service: Strengths of an Information Object Type

by Paolo Manghi

Repositorio Institucional www. saber. ula. ve: Una aproximación testimonial

by Rodrigo Torrens

5.-Estrategias y políticas institucionales para captura de contenidos en la Universidad de los Andes, Mérida (Venezuela)

by Rodrigo Torrens

Lessons for data sharing from institutional repositories

by Dana McKay

Co-authored with Rebecca Parker and Terrence Bennett (second author).  Presented at 'eXtreme eResearch', the eResearch Australasia Conference 2011, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 06-10 November 2011

Governments and institutions are increasingly interested in promoting open sharing of research data through... more Governments and institutions are increasingly interested in promoting open sharing of research data through institutional repositories: showcasing quality research data brings prestige to institutions and gives governments a visible return on financial investment in research and development. While the incentives for open data are clear for institutions and governments, any attempt to create an open data climate depends on the researchers who will choose to share their data (or not). Early attempts to foster an open data movement have met with little interest or action on the part of researchers, a result reminiscent of early attempts to recruit publications to institutional repositories. In this paper we draw on the institutional repositories literature to identify five major barriers to open data sharing: (dis)incentives, difficulty, danger, and existing disciplinary sharing practices. To change practice (and data sharing would be a major change for many disciplines), sufficient incentives must be in place to overcome old habits. There is currently little reward for researchers in data sharing: the risks are high and there are no research metrics available for measuring the impact of shared data. With so little incentive, the barrier to participation must be very low; however data sharing and curation are difficult at best. There are no standard ways to describe data, meaning cataloguing is taxing for both researchers and the repository librarians who would assist them. Not only is data sharing low-benefit and difficult, it is threatening to researchers: it may alienate their participants, and research data could be ill-used or misinterpreted. Finally, those who already share data in their own disciplines are unlikely to be willing to change their practice to meet institutional requirements: it is simply not worth it to them. The institutional repository literature highlights all these problems, and may even provide insight into some solutions.

Rothery, Andrew and Hayes, Sarah and Offen, Deborah and Davidson, Janet (2009) Final Report DRaW: Developing Repositories at Worcester Extending and Embedding the University Repository Service. Project Report. JISC.

by Sarah Hayes

The JISC DRaW Project has helped the University to establish repository use within its working practices and create an... more The JISC DRaW Project has helped the University to establish repository use within its working practices and create an environment where there are options for staff to choose the appropriate repository suited to particular purposes, and a coherent service for support and management. The most successful area of development has been the creation of a repository for research and related publications and the most difficult area to cope with has been that of learning and teaching materials. Indeed, the Project Team feels that there is still need for new initiatives in respect of e-learning resources.

Rothery, Andrew and Hayes, Sarah (2008) Repositories for learning and teaching materials: our recipe for success. Discussion Paper. JISC DRaW Project University of Worcester.

by Sarah Hayes

Paper from the May 2008 programme event: "Repositories for Learning and Teaching: is there a recipe for... more Paper from the May 2008 programme event: "Repositories for Learning and Teaching: is there a recipe for success?" Worcester, 20 May 2008, http://www.worc.ac.uk/drawproject/99.htm Based on the experience of the projects represented at the event we have presented some key ideas for successfully developing the use of an online repository for learning and teaching. Some are finding that staff take-up and engagement is slower to develop than is the case with research repositories. We have not tried to summarise the wealth of good advice already published, instead we suggest a few points, some new, which we all feel would help those starting out.

Is there a role for online repositories in e-Learning?

by Sarah Hayes

Many universities across Europe are introducing, or thinking of introducing, an online repository for learning and... more Many universities across Europe are introducing, or thinking of introducing, an online repository for learning and teaching materials. Evidence from development projects in the UK suggests that tutors are willing to share resources with each other. Yet they do not at present make much use of online repositories. Why is this? What can be done? Are repositories a good idea? Our article will explore and answer these questions. The authors together lead a project called “Developing Repositories at Worcester” (DRaW) funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

Engaging tutors in using e-repositories for learning and teaching.

by Sarah Hayes

Universities which set up online repositories for the management of learning and teaching resources commonly find that... more Universities which set up online repositories for the management of learning and teaching resources commonly find that uptake is poor. Tutors are often reluctant to upload their materials to e-repositories, even though the same tutors are happy to upload resources to the virtual learning environment (e.g. Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai) and happy to upload their research papers to the university’s research publications repository. The paper reviews this phenomenon and suggests constructive ways in which tutors can be encouraged to engage with an e-repository. The authors have recently completed a major project “Developing Repositories at Worcester” which is part of a group of similar projects in the UK. The paper includes the feedback and the lessons learned from these projects, based on the publications and reports they have produced. They cover ways of embedding repository use into institutional working practice, and give examples of different types of repository designed to meet the needs of those using different kinds of learning and teaching resources. As well as this specific experience, the authors summarise some of the main findings from UK publications, in particular the December 2008 report of Joint Information Systems Committee: Good intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials and Online Innovation in Higher Education, Ron Cooke’s report to a UK government initiative on the future of Higher Education. The issues covered include the development of Web 2.0 style repositories rather than conventionally structured ones, the use of tags rather than metadata, the open resources initiative, the best use for conventional repositories, links to virtual learning environments, and the processes for the management and support of repositories within universities. In summary the paper presents an optimistic, constructive view of how to embed the use of e-repositories into the working practices of university tutors. Equally, the authors are aware of the considerable difficulties in making progress and are realistic about what can be achieved. The paper uses evidence and experience drawn from those working in this field to suggest a strategic vision in which the management of e-learning resources is productive, efficient and meets the needs of both tutors and their students.