The Power of Personal Outreach to Populate an Institutional Repository

Online

Institutional repositories (IRs) remain a woefully underutilized resource at many universities and librarians. Although many faculty members agree that IRs are a good idea in principle, achieving actual follow-through and adoption is much more difficult. Some view depositing articles as yet another time-consuming obligation. Others, because they have access to most materials through their institutions, do not fully appreciate the value of green open access for many researchers. And perhaps for the majority, it simply isn’t on their radar. AUrora, Auburn University’s institutional repository, is a case in point. When it went live in 2013, librarians quickly reached out to campus units through departmental seminars, faculty meetings, and other outlets. Despite these efforts, the collection of librarian scholarly products included more individual contributions than all other schools and colleges combined (excluding items in digital collections). Over the past 6 months, however, the numbers have flip-flopped as we have ramped up efforts to promote the repository and taken a more varied and flexible approach. Most importantly, we have attempted to encourage usage by reducing time burdens on individual faculty members and enlisting the help of the Libraries’ graduate assistants. In this presentation, I will describe our multi-pronged approach, with a focus on the creation of a collection of university’s international climate change research center, a highly interdisciplinary group comprised of researchers in forestry, agronomy, entomology, engineering, geosciences, and more.