It’s Up and Running, Now What? Strategies for Building Content in an Institutional Repository

Abstract

In the December 2, 2006 SPARC Open Access Newsletter, Peter Suber predicts that in 2007, "[Institutional repositories] will soon be a new fact of life for universities, like libraries or web sites, and the discussion will shift from their utility to the best practices for filling them." (Issue #104, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02- 06.htm, accessed 12.06.2006) Georgia Tech's DSpace based institutional repository, SMARTech, reached 10,000 items shortly after 2 years in existence. Georgia Tech has also instituted a dark archive, named Aardvark, also based on the DSpace software for inhouse management of the Archives' digital materials, to serve as the basis for future public digital exhibits. Aardvark currently houses around 1,500 records and over 240 gigabytes of materials.

In August 2004, Georgia Tech Library launched SMARTech with approximately 2,500 legacy items. In the beginning, we focused on authors self-archiving pre-prints and postprints, research and technical reports, and electronic theses and dissertations. As interest in archiving other materials increased and we realized that our faculty were not properly motivated to submit their own work, we changed our approach to collecting materials for our institutional repository and added a dark archive for strictly archival material. Initially, after realizing faculty were not submitting to the repository, we focused on materials the library could easily harvest from Georgia Tech's web presence with little or no involvement necessary from the creators. At the same time, we saw the need to increase our services to capture more of the digital output of the campus while respecting the time constraints of the faculty and departments. We have launched an electronic publishing service, Epage @ Tech, to support the creation and capture of e-journals, conferences, and lecture series to facilitate scholarly communication. As we provide these tools to faculty to accomplish their goals and they in turn become more aware of the need for repositories, we are more likely to convince them to deposit their personal materials. We also provide technical support and training to departments wishing to digitize and submit their materials and partner with them to insert our services into their current workflows.

We will discuss: The technical support and training we provide departments to digitize and submit their own materials; How we partner with departments to capture materials using their current electronic workflows; How we provide production services to support e-journals, conferences, and the capture of lecture series, symposia, and the like; Planned services to introduce these services into individual faculty members' workflows.