General Promotion

Public Relations

Arguably you can achieve most prominence for your reposistory if you tie it in with your institution's public relations and news services. This is not just getting them to publish material about the repository, but also getting them to provide links to full texts in the repository from news items, press releases and the like. A good approach is to brief or train your Public Relations staff so that they know what may be available and how they can use it. This could be done individually, or as a group.

A typical scenario would be a press release or news item on some new research findings or a new award. In this case it is helpful to provide a link to the original article or to a publications list. However, publishers' online versions may be subscription-only, which limits the usefulness of the link. On the other hand, there may be an open access version available in your repository that can be linked-to instead. There have been reports that when such a link has subsequently been quoted in the national press, usage of the repository has gone through the roof. Such instances are therefore likely to improve the credibility of your repository within the institution.

If a cited publication is not in the repository, Public Relations could be instrumental in getting the relevant academic to submit the necessary item. Clearly therefore, it is advisable to develop a close working relationship with your Public Relations team. As time is usually of the essence in such situations, you should be prepared to hand-hold authors through the deposition process, if not do it for them: even though you don't want to set a precedent, the benefits might outweigh the disadvantage.

News Feeds

News feeds provide a facility that allows users to be informed when new items are made available in a repository. Users (people or machines) can subscribe to the feeds which can typically either relate to the whole of the repository, or to a particular collection that the user is interested in. RSS and Atom are the common formats used for feeds, and they can be read by special news readers such as Google Reader, although newer versions of popular web browsers and email clients often have feed readers built in.

Feeds can also be read by machines in order to populate other systems with information. A typical use case might be to display the latest papers deposited by staff in a department on their web site.

Most repository softwares have facilities for generating news feeds. Some repositories include a list of the most recent or most popular items on their home page. In fact this may even be taken from an RSS or Atom feed. This is a useful 'come back' feature, especially if it is a list of new items. Unfortunately, lists of the top ten most-read or downloaded items have tendency to stay the same for long periods of time (often because they need to be updated manually), and therefore such lists are less likely to inspire people to visit regularly, although it has been suggested that they might engender a spirit of competition between academics.

Links with Departments

Academic departments can exploit a repository in a couple of ways:

Appraisals and performance reviews of academic staff normally include an assessment of what they have published during the review period. While a simple bibliography may be sufficient, reviewers are likely to want to examine at least some full items, and the repository can obviously help facilitate this. Some institutions are, however, going further than this, and also asking staff how many items they have deposited in the archive during the review period. This underlines the department's commitment to Open Access to their staff, and in doing so raises the profile of the department with the general public.

Departments also like to have publications lists on their websites. These take two forms. Firstly, there are departmental list of publications, which aggregate the work of all their staff. Secondly, there are academic staff members' personal web pages which traditionally include research CVs, and typically contain publication lists. Ideally, to derive maximum benefit from a repository, these lists should be generated from repository data. This saves typing the data more than once, and reduces the risk of transcription errors. Additionally, the bibliography can link back to the item in the repository so that readers can access the full text. Each repository software platform has its own way of doing this, so you should refer to the documentation that comes with your software.

Promoting Usage Generally

Promoting usage of repositories in general, rather than just your own, has local advantages too. The more that repositories are used, then the more content will flow into them, and a positive feedback loop will ensue.

Since many or most repositories are set up and run by information staff, a logical place to start is to integrate repository search services with the standard search library and information services offered to academic staff and students. At its simplest, this may just be a matter of adding repositories and repository search servides to the list of electronic resources that are available. This may be more effective if targeted at specific disciplines, rather than lumped into a 'General Resources' list.

There are particular benefits to be accrued from promoting the use of the repository-based search services, OAIster, OpenDOAR Content Search, ROAR's Search. The search results from such services have a high probability of yielding open access full texts, whereas Google Scholar and to a lesser extent Google tend to direct searchers to subscription pages that can normally only be accessed on-campus or from within the University's virtual private network (VPN). This means that the Open Access search services can be used away from campus during vacations, and academic materials can be used by prospective and former students who are not affiliated to the institution. This is something that directly benefits researchers and teaching staff.

Another related approach is to encourage lecturers to include open access references on their reading lists, either as alternatives to, or instead of, the publishers' online editions. This likewise facilitates off-campus work, which could especially benefit assignment work and vacation reading. To achieve this, it is necessary to get the message across to departmental staff. This could be done within a general advocacy strategy. It is, however, also helpful to brief your subject librarians because they help to compile reading lists, and they are therefore in a good position of influence.