lib-ir: Fwd: [Dspace-general] Setting up an institutional archive: some experiences (fwd)

[Carol Hixson <chixson@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

An interesting message that I wanted to get in our archive.

Carol


>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:39:27 +0000
>From: Eriksson Jörgen <jorgen.eriksson@lub.lu.se>
>Reply-To: American Scientist Open Access Forum
>     <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
>To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
>Subject: Setting up an institutional archive: some experiences
>Resent-Subject: Setting up an institutional archive: some experiences
>
>Dear all,
>
>There has been some discussion earlier about the estimated cost for
>institutional archives. We will give a summary of how we have approched
>the task of setting up an institutional archive, some of our experiences
>and costs related to that work.We also hope this might stimulate others
>working with institutional archives to share their experiences with us.
>
>We have a long way to go to get self-archiving as a natural
>part of a researchers publishing behaviour. At the moment we
>have about one hundred plus full text documents in our repository
>[http://lu-research.lub.lu.se/]. It also serves as a bibliographic
>database for research papers, reports, articles etc. written by
>researchers affiliated to Lund University, and so far most of our records
>are just bibliographic. The way we have approched this task gives us a
>rather slow start in terms of resources in the archive in the short term,
>but we hope that it will be rewarding in the long run.
>
>We started working by setting up a demonstrator that showed a unified
>university perspective. We made a survey of what was available already
>at departmental web sites etc. and added samples from those to have some
>content to show as examples. We "launched" the demonstrator at a half-day
>seminar on electronic publishing/scientific communication in May 2002.
>
>We held five seminars on self-archiving and oa-issues in general
>during 2002 and 2003, all which have been fairly well attended (20-40
>researchers). We plan to hold at least one seminar per semester on
>different aspects of open access/institutional repositories. This
>semester we have also managed to be part of a range of courses
>which the Learning and Teaching Development Centre at Lund University
>[http://www.uclu.lu.se/english/default.asp] offers researchers. We also
>held a seminar in late 2003 for department and faculty librarians with
>the aim to enable them to promote LU:research and to work as first-line
>support to their researchers when questions on using LU:research arise.
>
>The ignorance among the researchers on the broader developments in
>scientific communication is widespread, but there is an awakening
>interest that we find important to support by arranging  these seminars
>and courses. An introduction to copyright issues which are part of
>our seminars is very appreciated and we have extended that work to
>include the creation of a standard licensce agreement that includes the
>right to self-archiving and re-use of papers in electronic versions of
>dissertations. This work is done together with the faculty of Law and
>the university's legal department. We have a finalised document now
>[http://www.lu.se/jurenh/INTERN/ModellFF.pdf] and we have also been
>discussing the creation of a web-site run by the legal department where
>researchers can find copyright-related information and personal support.
>
>Conclusions from our work.
>Different perspectives.
>
>* the university perspective only does not get the departments/researchers
>interested enough to participate. We have identified 3 different
>perspectives that the repository will try to satisfy:
>
>1. The University:
>
>The single, unified,  entry point is the University perspective
>[http://lu-research.lub.lu.se ]. It was also the University that already
>from the beginning wanted the adding of bibliographic records to the
>repository, not just full text. In the longer term the University sees
>LU:research as a marketing tool, and when the researchers/departments
>really start to use it, as a tool to help assessing research activities
>at different departments. There are no central, formal decisions on the
>use of the repository at the moment in this decentralised university. Our
>library director is raising awareness on different university management
>levels about these issues and a proposal for a policy will be on the
>agenda this spring.
>
>2.The faculty/department:
>
>One of the results of the first seminar was that we were approached
>by the information committee of the medical faculty. They wanted to
>show the output from their research but where not interested in just
>showing it in the university context. Together with them and their
>faculty librarian we created an independent user interface to their
>sub-set of our institutional repository, Lund Virtual Medical Journal
>[http://lvmj.medfak.lu.se/]. There are mainly bibliographic records
>so far, but now that we have gained their confidence and given them
>something that they feel belong to just them we have started to talk about
>self-archiving and through the support of their library they have begun
>adding full text to the bibliographic records. Here we would like to point
>out what a great help the RoMEO site is to that work. We have also talked
>to a LU researcher who is the editor of a medical journal and he has
>just recently obtained permission from the publisher (Taylor & Francis)
>to self-archive all articles by authors from Lund in LU:research. T&F
>does not accept self-archiving in general according to the RoMEO list.
>
>3. The Individual researcher:
>
>We are working with a software engineering research centre in our second
>"pilot project". They will use the same method as the medical faculty
>to generate a view of their own publications on departmental level. The
>addition here is that we will create a simplistic way for the individual
>researcher to dynamically add his publication list to his/her personal
>home page.
>
>= this generates extra technical work in creating ways of delivering
>the records in ways that suits our users and also in setting up their
>user interfaces when they don't have enough technical support of their
>own. You could argue that these costs are unnecessary, but as pointed
>out above, to be visible only in a central university service does not
>seem to be attractive enough to give an incentive to participate.
>
>Need for creating awareness.
>
>* researchers in general are indifferent/unaware of "the crisis/new
>possibilities in scientific communication" but there is an awakening
>interest and fanning that interest through seminars, lectures
>etc. generates support for our local repository.
>= this takes time and will generate a cost although it is not connected
>to the technical costs
>
>* ignorance regarding copyright is wide-spread and information on these
>issues are much appreciated (we are also lucky to have a member of the
>faculty of Law who is interested in these matters AND who is also a very
>good lecturer :-)) = this takes time and will generate a cost although
>it is not connected to the technical costs
>
>Our marketing strategy after finishing the pilot projects is in short:
>
>We are approaching every department, mainly through their libraries,
>and offer to visit and show through our examples/pilots what we can do
>for them. We already have a couple of departments beside the pilots who
>have started adding records/full text to the archive.
>Strengths we will stress:
>
>* Impact. Their output will reach more collegues through OAI-sevice
>providers. We have created a set for "full text available in archive"
>to make it possible for OAI-harvesters to harvest only those records. The
>problem here is the lack of good (not experimental) OAI service providers
>besides OAIster.
>
>* The economies of scale in centralised administration and data
>management/security that still leaves the possibillity to have their
>own user interfaces at personal and faculty/departmental levels.
>
>Practical stuff that is also needed.
>
>Helpdesk functions. Although we find the administration module in the
>GNUeprints software satisfactory , our experience is that not every user
>find it totally intuitive.
>Metadata quality. Time is also spent on controlling the metadata in the
>records added  to the archive, something we believe is needed, if the
>OAI service providers are going to work with some amount of precision.
>This kind of work will increase with the number of users adding
>records. It is done either by us centrally or at department/faculty level.
>
>As of today Lund University Libraries, Head Office are spending ca 1 FTE
>on the central administration/maintenance/marketing of LU:research. To
>this should be added the quality control/support performed at
>faculty/department level, which will depend on the level of ambition at
>each unit.
>
>We mean that it isn't a correct analysis to say that the cost of archiving
>is trivial, at least not when looking at the actual situation at Lund
>University. Hopefully it will be a more self-generating system in the
>long run, but seminars and courses about publishing issues will probably
>be needed for quite some time to come.
>
>We are very interested in getting in touch with other institutional
>archives to share experiences on ways of implementing an institutional
>archive.  Please send comments and your experiences either to the list
>or directly to us.
>
>Best regards,
>Jorgen Eriksson and Sara Kjellberg
>jorgen.eriksson@lub.lu.se
>sara.kjellberg@lub.lu.se
>Lund University Libraries Centre for Electronic Publication
>
>
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