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Collaboration to Data Curation: Harnessing Institutional Expertise

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

It can be argued that institutional repositories have not had the impact (Lynch 2003; Salo 2008), initially expected, on academic scholarly communications (the exception being in a few well-developed and successful instances).

So why should data repositories expect to fare any better? First, data repositories can learn from publication repositories’ experiences and their efforts to engage researchers to accept and use these new institutional services.

Second, they provide a technical infrastructure for storing and sharing data with the potential for providing access to complimentary research support facilities. Finally, due to the interdisciplinary expertise required to develop and maintain such systems, stronger ties will be forged between libraries, information and computing services, and researchers.

This will assist innovation and help to make them sustainable and embedded within academic institutional policy.

This paper, while aware of the diverse nature of institutional and departmental practices, aims to highlight a number of initiatives in the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, showing how research data repository infrastructures can be effectively realized through collaboration and sharing of expertise.

We argue that by employing agile community, strategic and policy judgment, a robust data repository infrastructure will be part of an integrated solution to effectively manage institutional research data assets. »

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2010.505823

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The Role of an Entity Registry in Schola…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The Role of an Entity Registry in Scholarly Communication: Exploring Creative Uses of Research Activity Data :

« The Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) is the University’s open access repository for research outputs. To simplify deposit in ORA, a registry has been created containing data harvested from existing sources to be used as repository metadata. The registry stores publicly available research activity data, that is, data about research including people, projects, and funders. Data held in the registry are available for purposes beyond the repository, particularly as the registry uses semantic web technologies which expedite data sharing. Value is added by aggregating disparate data for discovery, by making creative use of data such as revealing connections between entities and recording data provenance. This article describes the entity registry, its role within ORA, and as a tool to support scholarly communication. The advantages of storing data as entities and gathering, aggregating, and displaying research activity data to assist dissemination of research are explained. Examples of use of the registry and its data are provided that enable easy discovery of researchers and their activities and reveals hidden connections between them, thereby, encouraging communication and collaboration between different subject areas. Development of the registry and examples has been underpinned by extensive stakeholder analysis and user testing. »

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928391042~frm=titlelink

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From Service Providers to Content Produc…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

From Service Providers to Content Producers: New Opportunities For Libraries in Collaborative Open Access Book Publishing :

« Several libraries have become active partners in Open Access publishing of books in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). Not only have libraries started up their own presses, they are also collaborating with existing presses or forming alliances with other institutions on campus such as scholarly communication offices, ICT departments, and academic research centers. By combining institutional strengths and enabling the sharing of resources across institutions, these collaborations offer synergies and efficiencies in the scholarly book publishing business. This paper examines this new function taken on by libraries. Using research conducted by the European project “Open Access Publishing in European Networks” (OAPEN) on OA publishing models and business models for books, we look at libraries’ motives and challenges and explore how their new roles enable them to serve their customers in the most effective way. By combining digital repositories with scholarly publishing, libraries can facilitate and support HSS book publishing and can help sustain the scholarly monograph in the transition towards digital formats and an Open Access future. »

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928309305~frm=titlelink

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Cross-Disciplinary Writers’ Group Stimu…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Cross-Disciplinary Writers’ Group Stimulates Fresh Approaches to Scholarly Communication: A Reflective Case Study Within a Higher Education Institution in the North West of England :

« For the inexperienced writer it can be difficult to know how to start writing, while for those with some writing experience, it is often seen as a luxury for which there is precious little time to indulge. This reflective case study describes the role of a cross-disciplinary writers’ group, as a writing intervention, within a higher education institution in the North West of England. Established in 2006, the group has always had a librarian as part of its membership and has been informed by the literature on successful writers’ groups. Monthly meetings facilitate ongoing scholarly activity; we share group roles and seek to extend our knowledge of writing practice including writing conference abstracts, constructing an argument, collaborative writing projects, and negotiating authorship. At the inception of the writers’ group, members were seeking to develop their writing portfolio. We are now at various stages of our scholarly development, ranging from early career writers to well published authors and editors. The model of a collaborative writers’ group has provided a winning formula for those wishing to develop scholarly communications as part of their daily activities and has valuable lessons from which academic librarians might learn. »

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928309394~frm=titlelink

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The Economists Online Subject Repository…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The Economists Online Subject Repository—Using Institutional Repositories as the Foundation For International Open Access Growth :

« A new subject repository, Economists Online (EO), has recently been launched. The pioneering model upon which it is built, aggregating the subject specific content of a consortium of participating institutions and their repositories, is examined in this article. An overview of existing subject repositories is given, along with an analysis of the scholarly communications landscape in economics and how the new EO subject repository fits into this environment. This paper makes a case for collaboration between institutional repositories as a way of increasing Open Access (OA) access to research. »

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928292729~frm=titlelink

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Case Study: Re-Engineering an Institutio…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Case Study: Re-Engineering an Institutional Repository to Engage Users :

« When institutional repositories were introduced, many libraries embraced them as a means to support and further the cause of open access and the dissemination of scholarly communication. As has been widely reported, however, faculty did not embrace the concept, and repositories generally have not filled up as envisioned. We pose the question: is it possible to design an institutional repository that faculty and graduate students find useful and attractive enough to change their ingrained habits and incorporate into their work routines? The University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries is engaged in finding out. Based on two major user research studies, the team at Rochester determined that a number of crucial features were needed to attract end user interest: the system must become part of the workflow during the research and writing phase, it must support collaboration with users outside the institution, it must provide quantifiable evidence of use, and it needs to allow the users to control and showcase their work. Based on their research, the River Campus Libraries developed a new open source institutional repository software system called IR+. With IR+, Rochester is testing the findings from their research, to see if a repository that goes beyond the collection of finished scholarly works and engages academics in the creation stages of their research will prove to be a more successful model. »

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928310909~frm=titlelink

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Project Management and Institutional Repositories: A Case Study at University College Dublin Library

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

This paper describes University College Dublin Library’s participation in a series of parallel projects including building a national open access portal, Rian.ie; developing an international subject based portal, EconomistsOnline.org; and the planning, development and management of a university institutional repository (IR) service. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of the PMBOK® project management methodology.

While much of the literature on IRs concentrates on critical success factors, only a few papers suggest applying standard methodologies to IR project planning, and very few papers detail the complex process of planning an IR using these methodologies.

This paper addresses this gap in the literature and describes the practical experience of participating in two OAI-PMH harvesting projects at national and international levels and the effect that this has had on local IR development. Participating in the two services can be shown to have had a positive effect on all aspects of project management.

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928350149~frm=titlelink