1. Successful Institutional Repositories
in Action
Tim Tamminga
谭明葛
Librarian-managed institutional repository (IR) services have extended across campus – to faculty, students, centers, institutes, and other academic and administrative units. What do successful IRs look like?
In the webinar, I’ll explore two themes:
The types of content that can be managed within a platform like Digital Commons including student research and publishing, conferences, symposia, monographs, press imprints, peer reviewed journals and more.
I’ll also look further at how librarians are extending their Digital Commons services campus-wide – to faculty, students, centers, institutes, and other academic and administrative units – and the partnerships that are arising from those services.

2. First, something about bepress
Started in 1999 by University of California - Berkeley faculty to publish scholarly journals.
That publishing platform was expanded to manage content of all types over the next 2 years in a project with the University of California
Those same faculty members are still actively involved in formulating bepress’s vision for the future.
About 210 institutions today use Digital Commons 2

3. Digital Commons: a full service offering
Client Services Your IT team : design, implement, train, advise and support
Outreach Share bepress and subscribers’ best practices
Development New and improved capabilities, support and expand hardware / software infrastructure. Protect your repository.
The advantages of the bepress model—we free libraries to focus on delivering services to faculty and others on campus and gathering content. Hosting and maintenance are just a small part of the Digital Commons service. We don’t just support the system. We support the users of that system.

4. Digital Commons Community
Hosted platform
Content of any type
No limit on the amount of content
SEO: Optimized for major search engine crawlers: Google search (“subgrade assessment”)
Over half of our subscribers are institutions with graduate programs. Roughly a quarter are undergraduate and liberal arts colleges, and the remaining quarter are divided among law schools, medical schools, societies, and other institutions.
Almost all of these organizations have been affected by recent NSF and other funder mandates to share research data. As such, research data has become a hot topic among our subscribers.
In terms of active discover and dissemination, bepress ensures that that your content is discovered and disseminated.
Anyone can find Digital Commons through the web. You don’t have to have special software, a subscription, or an account. It’s web based and also discovered in major search engines.
Digital Commons generates pages that are indexable by major search engines in accordance with their best practices. We meet with Google to ensure that we follow best SEO practices. This allows the repository and its contents to be easily discovered on the web.
Click on the Google link to launch a standard Google search. A PDF article on the topic from Purdue University should be included in the top 5 search results. Click on that result to display the article. The first page is a stamped cover sheet that DC automatically inserts in front of all documents. The cover page can be customized to show the home organization’s logos, colors, and links to external sites like the organization’s home page and to its DC site.
Digital Commons is provided as a Software as a Service (SaaS). Bepress hosts and manages the hardware and software infrastructure for its customers. Bepress has a robust failover and backup strategy for its systems and repositories. Our Client Services group works with each customer on the design of their DC, the implementation process and ongoing support. All hosting and support is included in the annual subscription. There is no limit on the amount of content that a customer can place in their DC.

5. Digital Commons is: An Institutional Showcase (IR)
Collect, organize, manage, then disseminate intellectual output of the institution
Vibrant, growing, dynamic…
Built on a professional grade publishing platform
Apply structure to content, e.g. create an e-journal
Submission management, including workflows
Editorial tools, including peer-review workflows
“Digital Commons” is actually a suite of applications under one product offering: the “repository”, Selected Works, and Edikit 5

6. Digital Commons as a Showcase
Some examples of DC sites. The IR has to be a compelling site. It’s a showcase and ought to look like that. In these examples, bepress Client Services worked closely with the library folks on creating a beautiful site reflective of their institutions. Or perhaps what they wish their school’s website could be.
Let’s look at Eastern Illinois University’s Digital Commons, which they have name “The Keep.” It’s an example of a nicely designed homepage. That building, called Old Main, was the first building constructed on campus and was completed in 1899.
Or University of New Orleans’ ScholarWorks. UNO’s design closely follows the university’s own web site design including retention of the New Orleans skyline as the site’s footer. I can connect to the University’s home page to show how similar the two websites are.

7. As I mentioned at the beginning, there is virtually nothing that can’t be contained and showcased in Digital Commons. I would like to run through five different uses or types of content that we see managed in Digital Commons. For time’s sake, I’ll only show a couple of examples in each category.
Cal Poly’s Facilities Department: Cal Poly’s Facilities Department falls under Administration and Finance. It is an interesting story because the Facilities Department doesn’t seem like an obvious service partner for librarians. The architecture students were in frequent need of access to the master plans for the university. They had to set up appointments to go to the office of Facilities management and trek across campus in order to see these master plans. Putting the materials online has simplified things for the students as well as for the folks in Facilities Planning.
The department head also believed that the Facilities Department had materials of historic value such as old architectural plans. For example, in the early 1900s, the university built a number of houses on campus. Called “California Bungalows” these were torn down some decades ago. However, Facilities still had the original blueprints, which the Department Head wanted to make available.
Bryant College’s Bryant College: Goes to War
This collection of WWII letters and cards from Bryant alum who were serving in the military was found by the Library’s Director and some students going through the library’s archives. A Bryant history professor specializing in WWII correspondence used these letters for one of her classes. Several current Bryant students selected the letters as the focus of their capstone projects and were invited to present their paper at the 25th Annual Meeting of the National Social Science Association in Las Vegas. These projects can be found alongside the relevant letters within the IR collection.
[show Renza. Show a postcard. Wait for it to display in the metadata page. Then show students’ research paper.
This collection and the students’ research paper provide a nice introduction to the next use of DC to showcase student accomplishments.

8. There are tangible indicators of value including download counts (or usage). Almost any repository that includes student theses and dissertations will bear this out. This type of content tends to be the most heavily downloaded materials in the repository.
Texas State University ETD collection. Look at this Master’s thesis by a teacher who works with at-risk middle school kids. As part of his thesis, he includes a number of his talks. These talks were compelling enough that the IR Administrator included one of them on the meta data page. The student uses this site as part of his CV.
Colby College’s The Atlas of Maine is developed by students in the Environmental Studies course: Introduction to GIS and Remote Sensing. The goal of this project is to develop a series of maps highlighting the unique human and natural resources of Maine. What the teachers are finding is that the quality of student works dramatically improved when students understand that their project will be publicly available and they can see what students in prior classes have created. Colby is finding that it’s becoming a resource for Maine citizens.

9. The repository lends itself to content intended for a wider audience: regional, national and global.
Let’s go to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Community Engagement in higher education is defined by the Carnegie Foundation as "Collaboration between higher education institutions and their larger communities for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity." For UMass Amherst, Community Engagement creates unique opportunities for scholars to pursue teaching; research, creative or professional activity; and service in ways that benefit their discipline, the University and its community partners. The IR is a tool uniquely well-suited for supporting that mandate.
One example is the Cranberry Station community. Within it, UMass can gather literally anything that is relevant to the cranberry farmers in the State. That includes theses and dissertations, research papers and reports, studies of best practices, conferences and workshops, and so on.
Utah State University’s Student Organic Farm Newsletter.
The IR administrator was visiting the student-run community farm and noticed that the students were printing a periodic newsletter that described the vegetables being harvested, interesting facts about those vegetables and cooking tips. He offered to archive the newsletter in Digital Commons. USU’s Digital Commons is now providing the community farm with a new way to advertise, to archive past newsletters, and make visible a part of the College of Agriculture that was impossible to find on the College’s website.

10. Formal peer-reviewed journals
I have examples of 3 broad areas of publishing supported within DC. These include:
Monographs or books
Events publishing
The core of Digital Commons is a professional publishing system capable of managing manuscript submissions, blind and double blind peer review, communication with the authors, acceptance of a manuscript for publication and finally publishing a polished electronic journal within the repository.
Student Journals
Let’s start with student publishing. The number of student run peer-reviewed journals is skyrocketing. A couple of years ago, few Digital Commons sites had even considered student managed scholarly journals. At this point, almost 25% of all the 400 plus journals being published in Digital Commons are student journals. Let’s look at some of them.
Purdue University. Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research (JPUR)
This journal has strong support from the University administration including Purdue University’s President, Dr Cardova. Dr Cardova wrote an introduction to the inaugural issue of the journal. The last paragraph in her editorial is interesting because it places librarians as central in providing student publishing services:
“Even the most important research will have little impact unless it is communicated. Thus, this journal also serves to educate our best students about the publication process. The editorial and design team are students from the College of Liberal Arts who have worked with authors to help them articulate their results as clearly as possible. The Faculty Advisory Board has guided this work as well as filtering the many proposals received to select a few for publication. Experts in scholarly communication have played a particularly important role. Staff and faculty from Purdue Libraries, Purdue Press, and the Copyright Office have created a professional publishing experience equal to any of the major disciplinary journals.”
Illinois Wesleyan’s student journals Each of the journals listed here is sponsored and managed by a specific department. The one that I’d like to focus on is the Undergraduate Economic Review managed by the Economics Department.
This journal serves to portray another important aspect of these student journals. The departments are proud of these journals and will make significant effort to support, sustain and publicize the journals to their students and prospective students. Take this journal. Let’s click on the link to the Economic Dept. On its site, you can see a links to the student journal it sponsors.
Faculty advisor Mike Seeborg said, "We are a four year school, so the undergrads here don't have contact with grad students, but through these publications they can get at least some notion of the research process." Pedagogically, he sees value in students reading other students papers because (I quote) “Students can relate better to other students' work. These articles are more accessible (particularly in economics with the level of econometrics and mathematics required to often understand professional articles).”
What’s also interesting is that the department is working with other economics departments at other schools. Faculty at these other schools participate as advisors, and get their students to work as editors and authors.
Faculty Journals
There are so many terrific peer-reviewed journals being published by schools that it’s hard to pick just one. But I’ll go to just one example of a long-time Digital Commons journal being published at McMaster University.
Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies is a well-known subscription-based peer-reviewed journal that was started in 1971 by Russell’s archivist. The library persuaded the editors to move from print to electronic in 2002 for a variety of reasons including
Publishing within the repository enables creation of a collection and resource site for Russell’s papers, research, links and other materials that enhances the value of the journal. For example, see “Russell’s Texts.” This ability to create a context of related materials with the journal is unique to Digital Commons.
Books
ZEA E-Books is a publishing Imprint started by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln Library when they realized that there were all sorts of books that needed a home. These range from old books that were out-of-print, books published by retired faculty who owned the copyright, and books that needed to be published but no commercial publisher would touch them because the audience was too limited or perhaps too weird.
Let’s browse to the bottom of this page to look at the Online Dictionary of Invertebrate Zoology. This dictionary had gone through the review process and was about to be published by a university press, when the Press decided to get out of the business of publishing dictionaries. The manuscript sat on the author’s shelf for the next 15 years. When Paul Royster, the repository manager, was talking with the author, a department head, he noticed the foot high stack and asked about it. He then offered to publish it as an open access electronic book. The Online Dictionary has proved to be one of the most highly downloaded items in Nebraska’s DC – well over 60,000 times as of a year ago.
The University of South Florida is beginning to build a collection of open access text books. USF has a fantastic plan: faculty are given a stipend and time during the summer to write a text book. That text book is placed in USF’s Digital Commons and made available to students.
Events Publishing (or conferences)
Events publishing enables librarians to support groups within the school to capture a conference or workshop. The materials from the conference can be displayed as either proceedings or actually provided in a session format. All the components of a conference can be included: the paper or presentation, an audio or video recording of the presentation and perhaps the data underlying the paper. In addition, the publishing system can be used to support future conferences by managing submission of manuscripts or presentations, and evaluating which of them to accept for the event.
This example is a conference held by Utah State 3 years ago on IRs. The keynote speaker was Sayeed Choudhury from Johns Hopkins.
Other type of conferences that are especially popular are student research conferences.

11. And this brings us to the last example
And this brings us to the last example. The original purpose of the IR was to store and make accessible faculty published articles. And that is one of the most important aspects of the repository to be sure. One reason that librarians are so keen on showcasing faculty content is that a repository of faculty articles provides a branded and central collection of all that school’s peer-reviewed publications.
I wanted to show three examples of faculty research: a published article from a scholarly journal, faculty research intended for a specific audience, and a SelectedWorks page.
The Thomas Jefferson University example is a post print article published in Pulmonary Pharmacology. What’s nice about this example is that it shows supplemental content that the authors wanted to include with the article. In this case, these examples are additional figures and tables
The second example is from the University of Nebraska Lincoln from their Animal Science Dept. The target audience for these reports are livestock producers, extension educators, and people in agri-business. The articles are written in a format and style with the University’s Nebraska clientele in mind that is easy to read and understand.
The final example shows another bepress platform called SelectedWorks. SelectedWorks is a web-based platform that is aimed at individual faculty and researchers to post their own content, which can be articles, books, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, data, videos…anything. Content posted onto a SW site or onto the Digital Commons repository can be transferred to the other platform.
I’m going to show you an example from Boise State University starting from its Digital Commons home page. This example is from Marilyn Moody, Dean of Libraries at Boise State Univ. She has the choice of the landing page, in this case to the types of materials in her SW site. She can also create her own subject groupings. In Boise’s case, the administration of each SelectedWorks site is shared by the faculty member and a librarian. That allows a librarian to create the SelectedWorks site for new incoming faculty. If the professor ever leave Boise, he or she can take the site with them – it’s free for individuals. That ensures that faculty members will have a sense of ownership.

12. What makes a successful Repository?
The IR’s success comes from:
Creating services, not collections
Services that:
Enhance the educational process
Allow faculty and students to contribute in meaningful ways to their disciplines
Are meaningful to those receiving them, not just to the library
Services create dialogue: Can the library help us address this need?
Services beget services: Success with one partner creates opportunity with another
For some time, we have become really interested what makes a successful repository. Is it sheer numbers of objects like the number of faculty published articles? Is it the number of downloads or usage? These are interesting and important metrics but we think that the IR’s use to support librarian-services to their institution is of higher value.
As Isaac Gilman, Scholarly Communication librarian at Pacific University points out, services beget services. The more that librarians use the repository to support the needs of the university, the more essential it becomes.
T. Scott Plutchak, Director of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham, stated in his Janet Doe Lecture at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the U.S. Medical Library Association.
“…whereas in the past virtually all of the important work of a librarian took place in the library, our most important work will now take place outside.”
Gilman, Isaac, "Scholarly Communication: It's Not Just for ARL Libraries" (2011). Faculty Scholarship (PUL). Paper 12.

13. Where to find good information about IRs
Toolkits and Tutorials
Digital Commons Webinars
We sponsor a number of community webinars provided by librarians on IR and electronic publishing topics. We have an upcoming webinar being scheduled with Anurag of Google Scholar in a couple of months. We are providing a series of webinar workshops on scholarly publishing in the next few weeks. Please check our bepress Digital Commons website for information and registration if you wish to participate.
Research on Institutional Repositories: Articles and Presentations