the librarian as repository manager

The Librarian as Repository Manager

David KaneSystems Librarian

Waterford Institute of Technology

Stucture of this Presentation• My Background• The Changing Role of The Library• History of WIT Repository• The Main Challenge• Previous Promotional Efforts• Current Promotional Efforts• Related Projects

How did I end up doing this?

• Undergraduate degree: Zoology• Postgrad. Diploma: ‘Internet Systems

Development’ – D.I.T. • Worked in the web development industry• Later; DLIS – Aberystwyth (MILS pending)• WIT Libraries

My View of The Changing Library

In the past:• Historically, a place for storing and

preserving information Today:• More information outside library

walls than inside• Great challenge for Librarians

How the WIT Repository Happened

• 2007 – Set up– Dell PowerEdge 2900– Custom Design– LDAP Integration

How the WIT Repository Happened

Repository Benefits• Open Access to research is

about making research freely accessible, to all humanity. Permanently.

• Increase in citation count• Accessible to those who can’t afford journal

subscriptions• It undermines a 350 year

old publishing model97% Green!

The Major Challenge• Academics are:– Comfortable with tried and tested forms of

scholarly communication– Comfortable with their colleagues in the same

speciality– They already have their ‘social’ networks

Promotion Efforts• Emails• Information Sessions• Flyers• Video• Institutional Website – Repository Linkage• Twitter • Data entry (and quite a bit of perspiration!)

Current Promotion FocusLooking for ways to involve the research

office more closely....

• Gathering of references from institute staff• Creation of a repository blog

( http://repository.wit.ie/blog )• Institutional Open Access Mandate

Open Access Mandates in Ireland

The 5 Major Research Funding Bodies:• IRCSET • SFI• HEA• HRB (position statement)• IRHCSS (under discussion)

Academic Institutions:• DIT• WIT (hopefully)

Finally

ResearchScope: A novel way to improve the visibility of Irish

Open Access Research

Purpose• Improve the findability of Irish Open Access

research on the Web.

• Add an element of serendipity to repository records, in the metadata pages of repositories.

• Made possible with additional code that generates keyword-relationships between different records.

ResearchScope isA modified implemetation of PKP’s Harvester2

http://researchscope.net/

The harvesting of Metadata

Research-

Scope

Repository

Repository

RepositoryRepository

Repository

is followed by generation of keyword relationships, and then

Research-Scope

Repository

Repository

RepositoryRepository

Repository

the return of value added data

Research-

Scope

Repository

Repository

RepositoryRepository

Repository

in the form of links

Research-Scope

Repository

Repository

RepositoryRepository

Repository

Repository

Repository

RepositoryRepository

Repository

between all the recordsin the federation

more inward pointing links = higher search ranking in Google

Repository

Repository

RepositoryRepository

Repository

The links can actually appear at the bottom of each record in any of the repositories, and connect to similar research in the same, or other repositories.

There is evidence that ‘real’, keyword-rich links are the best kind in terms of getting a favourable search engine ranking

90% of the papers in your repository will have no links pointing to them.

Therefore, with a lower ‘page rank’, they are less likely to be found by researchers.

ResearchScope breaks this cycle.

Inward pointing links = higher search ranking in Google

Let’s see this in action…

Finally.

To try this out yourself.

Visit: http://researchscope.net/keyword/

Thanks.