Populating Institutional Catalogues

All institutions in the case studies agreed that the major issues with either institutional repositories or publications databases are not technical but procedural, organisational and attitudinal. Even in institutions where a repository project enjoys active senior management support, such as Bournemouth University, there continues to be resistance from some areas of the academic community to the discipline of updating the database every time there is an eligible output. It is reported that many academics view their principal loyalty to their subject and research peers rather than a specific institution and are therefore reluctant to contribute to an institutional catalogue.

The degree to which academic members of staff are involved in the maintenance of output catalogues varies widely across institutions. Queen's University Belfast is confident that its academic community will maintain the institution's publications database while other universities are much more sceptical and have other mechanisms in place such as backloading from commercial sites such as WoS and SCOPUS and/or periodic updates from local sources.

Another debate was the range of material that could be stored in the database. There was general agreement that while the set of outputs that would be subject to the REF bibliometric analysis was a necessary minimum set of data, for the system to be of real value to an institution it had to capture a full range of research outputs. (Given this, the term 'publications database' may be misleading.)

There was agreement that, while still useful for the bibliometric aspects of the REF, it will no longer be possible to rely on sources such as WoS, SCOPUS etc. for populating local catalogues as their scope will be too limited to provide references to the wider variety of outputs that will be stored. Developing robust processes for complete coverage is likely to prove challenging for many institutions.

All the case study institutions agreed that the preferred strategy was for the outputs catalogue to be continuously updated rather than a periodic, point in time, updating in response to either an internal calendar or external event such as the REF.