In Part I of this piece I wrote about the financial and human analysis I did to choose Berkeley Electronic Press (BE Press) for Olin’s Institutional Repository platform. Our small staff was the tipping point in choosing a hosted system.
When the basic architecture of our system was in place, we needed to turn to content. Olin has three full time staff members and four work study students. New staff could not be hired for this initiative. Knowing that a lot of “one-time” start-up work needed to be done, I turned to our local library school, Simmons College. An internship program had just begun, and we created an intern position.
An initial task was to create a list of journal articles that had been published by Olin authors. Olin College is still a relatively new school, and by using a zip code search in Web of Science we were able to obtain virtually all of the article citations that had been generated from Olin since its inception. Our Simmons intern had the task of creating a master spreadsheet of the publications in which Olin articles had appeared. A Sherpa page was created within this sheet. Column headings included: Publisher, Sherpa color, Version (as in which version of an article would a publisher allow in a repository), Restrictions & notifications, Conditions of acknowledgment, Conditions of linking, and the URL to each publisher record in Sherpa. This spreadsheet now helps determine the workflow for getting an article into the repository.
While the Simmons intern was creating the publishers/Sherpa sheet, a student worker was assigned the task of loading all of the past Olin citations into another page of this spreadsheet. Because this was not the sole task of this student, a single semester was not enough time for the project and citations will continue to be loaded in the upcoming semester. As citations were added, though, journal titles were matched to publishers and a path for loading an article into the repository was determined. The Public Services Librarian took on the task of interacting directly with publishers and faculty. Olin created an opt-out policy for loading content.
The Public Services Librarian also began to generate the Selected Works pages from the content that was loaded into the repository. Selected Works pages are faculty/student/staff pages that showcase the work of an individual.
Two other major pieces of content in the repository will be student work and course content. An opt-out policy is also in place for student work, and senior projects are the first area of focus. I am taking on this project, sending messages to alumni to address past student work as well as contacting current students. I then load available content. The course content is an initiative to aid with accreditation. Basic course information is being loaded along with syllabi, assignments, quizzes, and other course materials. I am interacting with faculty members, the Registrar’s Office, the Communications Office and Institutional Research to obtain the necessary materials for this project.
Education of the Olin community on the repository and its initial article content, along with information on scholarly publishing, is another important step in repository development. Our Simmons intern created a LibGuide on Scholarly Communication. The content focuses on author rights, publishing in repositories, publishing in traditional journals, rights resources, copyright, and Creative Commons.
We have used the time of two out of three of our full time staff as well as a library school intern and a student worker to get the repository up and running. A great deal of content still needs to be loaded, and the two staff members along with a student worker will remain the key players. Interns will likely be brought in for individual projects again in the future.
While dedicated Institutional Repository staff would be ideal, the small size our school and budget makes this option impractical. With some creative shifting of tasks as well as the utilization of student labor as well as internship time, Olin College has been able to launch its repository with initial content and have workflow in place to continue to build.
