Institutional Repositories: Populating and Searching

IRs

Anthony W. FergusonUniversity of Hong KongLibrarian and Acting Director of IT in Learning

Today’s Goals

Discuss how to get the members of your academic community to populate your institutional repository (IR) and

Discuss how to maximize for your faculty the value of the items added to it through the optimal use of metadata

Background: What is an Institutional Repository?

“islands of information across the landscape of the Web.”

“A recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship of our universities will increasingly be represented, documented, and shared in digital form, and that a primary responsibility of our universities is to exercise stewardship over these riches: both to make them available and to preserve them.”

“. . . the means by which our universities will address this responsibility both to the members of their communities and to the public.”

“It is a new channel for structuring the university's contribution to the broader world, and as such invites policy and cultural reassessment of this relationship.”

Basic Components

Digital information Computer server A relational database placed upon the server A client system used to load content into the

database An end user interface to search/harvest the database

and display what is sought Some sort of system that screens what data can be

viewed and by whom can it be viewed People to make all sorts of decisions about what

content can be added to the database, how the content should be formatted, and how to describe the data so that search engines can find what users want

Information Characteristics

Grouped into communities, archivesCommunities might be departments, etc.Can hold the full text data itself or pointers

to other servers where the full text residesData are given persistent URLSData is described using metadata, e.g.

author, title, creator, etc., so that search engines like Google can find it.

Types of Digital Information

Bibliographies Campus magazines Campus newspapers Committee reports

and memoranda Conference

proceedings Consulting (technical)

reports

Departmental publications

Grant applications and other documentation

Journal articles Learning objects Maps Multimedia

publications Pamphlets

More Types

Photograph/slides Poster session

displays Preprints Reformatted digital

library collections Research and

technical reports Sound recordings Statistical reports

Surveys and survey results

Technical documentation

Technical drawings Theses & Dissertations Theses and

dissertations Videos Working papers

IR’s No. 1 Problem

Getting ContentAn April 2004 survey of 45 IRs found the average

number of documents to be only 1,250 per repository, with a median of 290.

This is a small number when considering the hundreds of thousands of dollars and staff hours that go into establishing and maintaining an IR.

For example, MIT Libraries estimate that their IR will cost $285,000 annually in staffing, operating expenses, and equipment escrow. With approximately 4,000 items currently in their IR, that is over $71 spent per item, per year.

What is the problem? Fills few needs: Foster/Gibbons

Author Needs (F/G) What an IR can Do

Work with co-authors Not a concern

Track variant versions

Not a concern

Make work know Yes – can help a lot

Access others’ work Only if they have an IR

Keep up with field Yes – can help a bit

Organize own papers Possible

Control ownership, security, & access

Yes – but allows many more people to access

More of What is the problem?

Author Needs (F/G) What an IR can Do

Preserve access Yes. Strong point.

Not responsible for servers

Yes. Strong point

Avoid copyright issues

Maybe a larger problem

Avoid computer issues

Yes – but still complicated

Reduce chaos One more thing to do

No more work This is more work

Foster and Gibbons’ Solution

Focus on solving faculty concernsShowcase them personallyPreserve their workProvide links to their workLet them control their own dataMaintain server for themDon’t ask them to do anything

complicated

Top 18 Things You Can DoTo Get People to Populate

Your Institutional Repository

This is one time that it is not true that “if you build it they will come”

No. 1 Solution: Low hanging fruit

1. Look for low hanging fruit Find out who already contributing to

other repositories: OAIster harvester Surf your own university’s home page Find out who is publishing in OAI

journals Load exiting digital content you might

have Google your own University

No. 2: Actively educate

2. Conduct active education campaign F2F introductions Departmental meetings Newsletters

Researcher at MIT said it took 5-7 contacts with IR before they participate

No. 3 Showcase individuals not departments

Showcase individualsMake it look like clickable resumeMake them know that Google will

crawl itTell them about higher citation ratesTell them how easy it will be to refer

others to their workMake sure it is easy to do

No. 4: Tell them when someone reads their content

Provide faculty with statistics on use of their materials

Feature top 10 downloaded papers/objects

Publicize, publicize, publicize

No 5: Look for retirees

Look for recently or soon to retire faculty

They have a lot of contentThey may not be sure what to do with itShow them a better way to be

rememberedThey have time to work on copyright

problems, metadata, etc.

No. 6: Ask Library Liaisons For Help

Ask the about top publishersAsk about who is up for tenureAsk about who is creating datasetsAsk them to give presentations at

faculty meetingsAsk them to talk to the graduate

students who need to get known

No. 7: Send Out Surveys

Ask who is contributing to other repositories or preprint archives?

Ask them where they store their digital content?

Ask about number of times they send out copies of articles to others?

See who has their own pages with data?Ask them if they think their digital

materials will be there in 5 to 10 years?

No 8: Create an IR Web Page

Give step by step instructions on how to add content to their part of the IR

Show how they can point from their web page to the IR

Give information about the value of persistent URLs

Provide links to information about publishers who support IRs

No. 9: Contact Those Using Blackboard, etc.

Ask them about what they are doing with their non active files when they are not currently teaching a class

Invite them to deposit their files

No. 10: Check University Calendar

Most departmental conferences, symposia, etc will have unpublished papers, power points, etc., digital content

Help them put them together in the form of a online book of readings, a transaction

No’s 11 & 12

11. Hold pizza and beer/tea lunches for graduate students to introduce them to IRs and how they can get their name/work out there. Ask Faculties and Departments to select Top X papers each year and put them into the IR.

12. Ask departments that process professional leave/travel requests to insert a brochure about contributing their papers to the repository.

No’s 13 & 14

13.Carefully get University Administration to encourage/require deposit sponsored research in the repository

14.Give faculty members an easy to use form/addendum securing IR deposit rights which they can send along with their paper once a journal publisher has accepted their paper

No. 15 & 16

15.Look for departments trying to publish their own journals and show them how an IR can help them do it online for much less money

16.Ask your university press/others in your area if they wouldn’t like to digitize their out of print books and add to the IR

No. 17 & 18

17.Work with your university archive to use the IR as a medium of exposing their digital resources to the world of scholarship

18.Point out that an IR’s contents capture and reflect a university’s intellectual capital, the quality and quantity of the research being done there.

2nd Topic: Maximizing Value Through Metadata

What is metadata?In the old days we had author,

title, and subject headings in our card catalogues

Now we have author, title, etc., metadata headings in our online catalogues and in IRs

Metadata Schemes

Libraries use the MARC MAchine Readable Cataloguing metadata standard

There are US, China, UK, etc. flavours IRs use the Open Archives Initiative

Protocol for Metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) standard

OAI-PMH employs the 15 Dublin Core headings

Dublin Core Elements

1. 1 Title 2. Creator 3. Subject 4. Description 5. Publisher 6. Contributor 7. Date 8. Type

9. Format 10. Identifier11. Source12. Language]13. Relation 14. Coverage 15. Rights

Dublin Core Pro’s and Con’s

Pro Compared to MARC,

DC is wonderfully simple

Search engines like Google can trawl it and know what it is looking like since the XML markup language is familiar to it – users can do systematic searches and find what they want

Con Still time consuming Time costs money HKU’s library adds

50,000 books a year Employs 20 or so

cataloguers Most universities

would be loathe to create another costly library bureaucracy

How Metadata is Added to an IR

Possible Solutions

Possible solutionsMake the faculty

do all the work

Possible reactionsFaculty members

like to do research not fill out forms.

Possible Solutions

Idea Consequence

Make the contributor do all the work

Faculty want to do research, not fill forms

Have computer automatically do it

Easier to say it than do it

Train faculty secretaries/staff to do all the work

Still will need editors to review and fill in holes

Use existing metadata for items that already have it

Good idea when you have it, e.g., digital theses, etc.

Conclusion:

The IR movement was initially dominated by the anti commercial publishing movement

Now, it isn’t. More and more publishers are allowing IR postings.

IRs are now becoming mainstreamThe suggestions given here will hopefully

help gain community support and will maximize the value of what is contributed.