Exercising creativity to implement an institutional repository with limited resources
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The College of New Jersey Library had intended to implement an institutional repository since 2008. Many options were approached to secure resources for the new digital repository initiative but to no avail. It was not until early 2011 that we had a long awaited breakthrough when a team of three faculty librarians received a MUSE (Mentored Undergraduate Summer Experience) grant to implement a pilot IR for the open access initiative to take off. The College MUSE program is established to promote and support campus-wide faculty-student scholarly and creative collaborative activity. This was the first library MUSE project. Two students majoring in Computer Science were recruited to help install IR + (recently developed and released as open source by University of Rochester) and customize the codes to enhance local access and data entry. This presentation will describe the implementation process, how our students collaboratively working with the IR+ software developer to add new features for data migration as well as lesson learned. Planning and actions taken to sustain the initiative including digital rights management and outreach within and outside the campus academic community will also be described. Presenters: Cathy Weng and Yuji Tosaka, The College of New Jersey
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Exercising creativity to implement an institutional repository with limited resources
- 1. Exercising Creativity to Implement an Institutional Repository with Limited Resources Yuji Tosaka Cathy Weng The College of New Jersey June 9, 2012 NASIG Annual Conference, Nashville, TN
- 2. Presenters 2 Yuji Tosaka Cataloging/Metadata Librarian The College of New Jersey Library Cathy Weng Head of Cataloging The College of New Jersey Library
- 3. Presentation Outline 3 IRs and IRs at smaller academic institutions – Context and problems IR efforts at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) MUSE project – TCNJ IR pilot development Life after MUSE
- 4. The College and the Library 4 The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) State college, located in Ewing, NJ Seven schools, primarily undergraduate programs Approximately 6,000 undergraduate students Faculty and undergraduate research strongly encouraged and supported TCNJ Library Collectionsize: over 600,000 volumes Few digital library collections *Images taken from TCNJ web site, May 3, 2011.
- 5. 1 IRs and IRs at smaller academic institutions Context and problems
- 6. IR Context and Problems 6 IR needs and benefits at academic institutions IR challenges at smaller institutions IR implementation options at smaller institutions
- 7. Institutional Repository 7 Digital library collection and service designed to manage, organize, and showcase the intellectual output of an academic community to a broader audience
- 8. IR needs at academic 8 institutions Take stewardship of the intellectual output of the campus community Open access and dissemination of faculty scholarship Showcase student research and accomplishments: demonstrated academic/educational quality Institutional advancement and accountability
- 9. IRs and Smaller Institutions 9 ―Sleeping beast of demand for institutional repositories (IRs) from master’s and baccalaureate institutions‖ Librarians at these institutions ―want to know about the IR experiences of master’s and baccalaureate institutions generally. They also want to learn about their peers’ experiences with IR costs, required technical expertise, funding the IR effort, whether the local learning community will contribute to and use the IR, and raising the issue of IRs with their institution’s central administration.‖ Source: Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States (Council on Library and Information Resources, 2007), p. 74-75 [http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub140/pub140.pdf]
- 10. IR Challenges at Smaller 10 Institutions Limited resources Funding Staffing Technical expertise/support Need for a minimal cost approach to develop and maintain IRs
- 11. IR implementation options at 11 smaller institutions Predominant choice: consortial repositories Other options Outsourcing:vendor-hosted platform Independent repositories *Jingfeng Xia and David B. Opperman. (2010). Current trends in institutional repositories for institutions offering master's and baccalaureate degrees. Serials Review 36, 10-18. Melissa Nykanen. (2011). Institutional repositories at smaller institutions in the United States: Some current trends. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 23, 1-19.
- 12. 2 IR efforts at TCNJ
- 13. TCNJ IR Developing Journey (bumpy road) 13 IR initiative began in Spring 2009 Assessed local resources Conclusion: very limited – i.e. support of hardware and software, staffing, etc. Decision made to move forward with existing staff and an open source system Explored open source IR platforms DSpace, Greenstone, Fedora Progress made with RUcore (Rutgers Community Repository, a Fedora based system) Other possibilities also explored to no avail
- 14. Change of Strategy 14 Exercised beyond the box thinking Initial goal – a pilot IR Possibility of involving students helping with developing an IR Utilizing campus resources Ultimate goal – a permanent and sustainable library service TCNJ MUSE Program seemed a good fit
- 15. TCNJ MUSE Program 15 MUSE – Mentored Undergraduate Summer Experience TCNJ Faculty-Student Scholarly and Creative Collaborative Activity Eight weeks (June-July) of summer research program Undergraduate students conduct research or engage in creative activity in mentored collaboration with TCNJ faculty
- 16. TCNJ MUSE Program 16 Program funds research stipend (both students and faculty), student on-campus housing Project grants competitive; reviewed and selected by Faculty-Student Collaboration Program Council
- 17. Forming a Team for MUSE Project 17 Library faculty to handle Technical needs Content recruitment Metadata application Rights management Front / back ends IR platform ease of use Computer Science major students To learn library repository system To learn system installation and server administration To learn working in an open source community To help customize open source IR to meet local needs
- 18. Library MUSE IR Pilot Team 18 Three library faculty Emerging Technologies Librarian Head of Cataloging Cataloging/Metadata librarian Two Computer Science major students Recruited with help from a Computer Science faculty MUSE application package prepared and submitted in February 2011
- 19. Library MUSE Project 19 March 2011 – Library IR team successfully awarded MUSE grant ($9,795.00) Significance: Firstever Library MUSE Project Library’s participation in academic mentoring Recognition of library faculty as part of the research community Acknowledging the importance of a campus central repository
- 20. MUSE General Schedule 20 June 6-July 29, 2011 (8 weeks) Weekly luncheons to learn academic research Voluntary progress reports throughout MUSE symposium held in week 8 Oraland poster presentations of all MUSE projects
- 21. Preparation 21 The team critically and carefully examined and evaluated open source IR platforms IR+ selected for TCNJ adoption for its next- generation look and feel
- 22. IR+ 22 Developed by University of Rochester First production release: August 2009 Has promising features Browse by author, publication, sponsor Faceted filtering Author’s workspace for collaboration and self archiving Name authority control Researcher’s profile page
- 23. IR+ Image taken from UR 23 Research website, accessed, 5/24/2012.
- 24. Image taken from UR Research website, accessed, 5/24/2012 24
- 25. IR+ Faceted filtering search results Image taken from UR Research website, 25 accessed, 5/24/2012
- 26. Project Process – General 26 Established initial contact and maintain close communication with IR+ developer and repository coordinator Assessed system requirements for hardware – server space, server specifications, etc.
- 27. Project Process – Technical 27 part Chose to have a physical server over virtual server Allowedstudents to learn server administration IR+ manual written for Windows server Reviewed Installation manual System administration manual User manual Learned to use the system As administrator As user As author
- 28. Project Process – Content 28 Building Outreached two departments: Library, Department of Chemistry Obtained lists of publications authored or co- authored by library and Chemistry faculty Began to establish preliminary metadata application profile and create metadata
- 29. Project Process – Copyright 29 management Sought advice for copyright management Used SHERPA / Romeo as first place to check for instructions of posting articles on IR Contacted publishers as needed for further clarification of copyright regulations Established local profiles for individual publishers and journals
- 30. Logistics of Working with 30 Students MUSE Google site established for communication and expectation Announcements Calendar Collaborating documents Dailyreport Suggested added features Related timelines
- 31. MUSE IR+ site on Google 31
- 32. MUSE IR+ site on Google 32
- 33. 33
- 34. Project Logistics 34 Students and library MUSE faculty met weekly to discuss project progress and assignments for the following week Emerging Technologies librarian met with students almost daily and provided technical advice Frequent informal discussions with students as needed
- 35. Project Logistics 35 Students later joined IR+ community and received much needed guidance from the original software developer
- 36. Project Outcomes 36 TCNJ pilot IR, TCNJ Digital Scholar, successfully implemented Local enhancements made (e.g. more intuitive metadata creation process) Over 70 records (articles, book chapters, ppt presentations, poster presentations) created Most significantly: contributed to enhancement of IR+ version 2.1 general release To support batch import and export of MARC 21 files
- 37. Project Outcomes 37 Preliminary metadata application profile established Preliminary rights management workflow established
- 38. TCNJ Pilot IR 38
- 39. 39
- 41. 3 Life after MUSE Program Work in progress – From a pilot to a sustainable service
- 42. From a Pilot to a Sustainable 42 Service Library administration support Library faculty support Policy/procedure development Metadata Copyright and permissions Future plan Collection development Campus outreach/buy-in
- 43. Support from Library Administration 43 and Faculty Library Administration Dean obtained some funding from Academic Affairs to hire a student worker for help with further IR development Library Faculty IR demo, Q&A document for keeping the library faculty informed Faculty expressed support for moving forward on IR planning as a new library initiative Work in progress to develop an initial formal IR proposal to the Dean with input and comment from the entire library faculty
- 44. Metadata Application Profile 44 Continued to refine the local metadata documentation Why? — metadata quality control mechanism Accuracy, completeness, consistency in metadata creation Clear guidance for paraprofessionals and student workers Revised profile worked well with a student worker
- 46. Copyright and Permissions 46 Continued to develop a simple and intuitive yet organized workflow Existing tools used to record publisher copyright notices: e-mails (58.2%), hard-copy printouts (47.8%), spreadsheets (41.8%) *Ann Hanlon and Marisa Ramirez. (2011). Asking for permission: A survey of copyrights workflows for institutional repositories. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 11, 683-702. TCNJ experiment with CORAL for copyright management
- 47. CORAL 47 Centralized Online Resources Acquisitions and Licensing Open-source ERMS, built by the University of Notre Dame library (2010– ) Adopted by TCNJ for use as ERMS Its functionality inspired IR team and is being tested for IR copyright management CORAL worked well with a student worker
- 49. Copyright Information on Excel
- 53. What’s Next? 53 Collection development Majorfocus on student work: reflection of the increasing emphasis on deep student learning and intensive faculty-student collaboration in scholarly and creative activity Campus outreach/buy-in Need for multiple approaches to promote the IR as a unique library service
- 54. What’s Next? 54 Copyright and permissions management Experiment with CORAL for managing author permissions If CORAL works, might suggest to IR+ developer to incorporate into IR+
- 55. Conclusion 55 Minimum-cost, bottom-up approach to developing an IR with limited resources Think like a startup/entrepreneur Be flexible and try any approaches that work Do not aim for one big rollout Quickly formulate a ―good enough‖ plan and implement Constantly review and adjust Never fear ―failures‖
- 56. Thank You! Questions? tosaka@tcnj.e 56 du weng@tcnj.ed
Notes de l'éditeur
- The title for our talk is “Exercising creativity to implement an institutional repository with limited resources.” Our main purpose is to discuss some practical steps that smaller institutions might take to develop their own IRs from scratch with much local resources. Given the existing focus on the large research university experience, we hope that it will be valuable to share our experience with other institutions with similar characteristics who may be interested in having their own IRs.
- First, I will first talk briefly about the overall context and problems of IRs for smaller institutions that may be different from large research universities. Next, Cathy will take over and give an overview of IR efforts at The College, which had been hampered by the limited resources. Then, Cathy will discuss our MUSE project last summer, which is a college-wide mini-grant program for working with selected undergraduate students in research and creative activity. We will discuss how we grabbed at this internal opportunity to jumpstart our IR pilot development. Finally, I will talk briefly about life after MUSE, about still ongoing development of our repository.
- Our institution is a state college located in Ewing, central New Jersey, about 10 minutes from the state capital Trenton and Princeton, and also just between New York and Philadelphia. It is a highly selective residential college focusing on the undergraduate experience. We have about 6,000 undergraduates, with seven schools. Faculty and undergraduate research, especially their collaboration, is strongly encouraged and supported. The library is medium-sized, with over half a million volumes. Currently, we have few digital library collections.
- Here, we will first talk about IR needs and benefits at academic institutions, then about IR challenges at smaller institutions, and finally about the current state of IR implementation options at smaller institutions.
- An IR is a digital library collection and service that is designed to manage, organize, and showcase the intellectual output of an academic community to a broader audience. Started in the early 2000s, IRs have reached significant mass, with millions of downloads at many large repositories.
- Why do we need IRs at academic institutions? What are their main benefits? First and foremost, IRs would allow universities and colleges to take stewardship of the intellectual output of the campus community. IRs would help to centralize and provide long-term access to the institution’s intellectual assets to a wider audience in ways that are not well supported by traditional library and publication models. IRs would promote open access and dissemination and increase the visibility and impact of your faculty scholarship in the digital age. Also, IRs would give us an official place for showcasing student research and learning outcomes and thereby demonstrating the academic and educational quality of your institution. Last but not least, IRs would be important for institutional advancement and accountability in general as an official medium for communicating your institutional accomplishments. Particularly for public colleges and universities, they would also help enhance public accountability by showing a “return on investment,” that is, the results of publicly supported faculty research and education conducted on campus.
- Large research universities were the early IR adopters, focusing on dissemination of their faculty scholarship. They still vastly outnumber other categories of universities and colleges in IR development. And yet, as an IMLS-funded research noted here found five years ago, there is still a “sleeping beast of demand for institutional repositories (IRs) from master’s and baccalaureate institutions.” This research also found that librarians at such smaller institutions “want to know about the IR experiences” of similar institutions generally. “They also want to learn about their peers’ experiences with IR costs, required technical expertise, funding the IR effort, whether the local learning community will contribute to and use the IR, and raising the issue of IRs with their institution’s central administration.”
- What are some of major IR challenges at smaller institutions? Perhaps the biggest common hurdle to IR development is the problem of limited resources at such institutions. Funding is limited. Staffing and technical expertise and support are also limited. In our library, for example, we have long had only a systems librarian taking care of library information technology single-handedly, as opposed to large research institutions with many dedicated library IT staff. Given these limitations, we felt that small institutions like our college needed to pursue a minimal cost approach to develop and maintain IRs as new library initiatives.
- What are IR implementation options at smaller institutions? According to two recent studies noted on this slide, the predominant IR option for small institutions is using consortia. More than 60 percent took this route. But consortial options may not be available for your libraries. Outsourcing to vendor-hosted platforms like Bepress’s Digital Commons is another important IR choice, adopted by about 20 percent of small institutions. Proprietary vendor platforms may be easy and quick. But they are fairly expensive with annual license fees and may not be affordable. That leaves independently operated repositories as a third, least adopted option, and this has been the IR route adopted so far at our college. It has been quite a bumpy road, but Cathy will next talk about how we strived to develop an IR initiative operating on little funding or staffing, while identifying available resources and partners within and outside the library.
- TCNJ IR initiative began in Spring of 2009. A library digital projects working group was formed to investigate and identify library materials which should be digitized for preservation and broader public access purposes. Developing a TCNJ IR was identified as one of the targeted services. Without a product, it was difficult to sell IR to the library administration and ask for financial and other physical support as everything was abstract. The group was also reluctant to pursue a commercial product as quite a few good open source IR products were available in the field. Our Library Dean did give a go-ahead with the initiative.We explored a couple of open source IR platforms including …We also seriously considered working with Rutgers University Library. The deal is to have Rutgers host our IR using their home-grown Rucore digital repository system and develop TCNJ’s own IR portal. It did not work out at the end.
- With the roadblocks we ran into, a change of strategy was needed for a breakthrough to happen.It might be doable if we can start small. That is to have a pilot first.
- With the summer MUSE program and a pilot IR in mind, the library digital projects working group formed a library MUSE project team to handle various tasks. It was clear that we need faculty to handle ….and for the mentoring aspect of the project, we thought we could recruit computer science major students to …
- The three faculty to work on the IR pilot included:The Emerging Technologies Librarian who was newly hired in Nov. 2010. to manage the technical aspect of the projectThe Metadata / Cataloging Librarian and the Head of Cataloging will work on the content building, metadata application, copyright clearance, customization of public interface.
- In March 2011, the Library MUSE team learned they were awarded the MUSE grant.This was extremely significant for the library and for the three library faculty involved because:This was the first EVER library MUSE project.It represented the library’s active participation in academic mentoring.It also showed the recognition of library faculty as part of the research community.Most importantly, the success of the grant application also indicated that the MUSE review council acknowledged the importance of having a campus repository system to store, preserve and showcase the academic community’s scholarly output.
- The MUSE team started to prepare for the summer project Even. We critically,carefully examined and evaluated open source IR platforms. At that time Dspace was one time a favorable candidate.Later the MUSE team decided to adopt another newer open source IR system – IR+.
- This is U. R.’s institutional repository UR Research. It has a very contemporary look and feel. IR+ has features of Institutional collections from various academic depts and institutions. It also has researcher’s profile pages. Down here, you can also see the usage statistics with number of collections, number of publications, number of downloads and number of members, etc.
- A very neat researcher’s page with general biographical information on the left and research products on the right.
- Working on implementing the pilot IR technical part,We chose to have a physical server over virtual server – with the Library Dean’s help, our campus IT dept. was very helpful to give us options of having a physical server or some virtual space for the IR.
- TCNJ Librarians have faculty status. With Library Faculty’s support, it was easy to obtain a list of publications authored by TCNJ Library faculty.With the help from our Science and Engineering Librarian, we successfully recruited content from four Chemistry faculty.
- For copyright management, we sought copyright clearance advice from our colleagues in other institutions who have implemented their IRs.
- Documents prepared by both students and the faculty were posted on the Google site.
- Students were asked to post their daily activities to keep track of the status and progress of various specific tasks. The daily report also served as a log to document the student’s learning process of the IR system.
- To keep all MUSE members informed, the two students and library faculty also met every Thursday to discuss …The students workstations were located in the Cataloging Dept., it’s very easy for us to discuss various issues the students. It worked the same if the students wanted to ask us questions.
- Another note worthy was the two students later joined the IR+ community and established formal communication with the original IR+ softer developer and received direct assistance from Nate Sarr from U. of Rochester. Nate later invited our student Mike to work with him to enable batch import and export from IR. This turned out to be a successful intent.
- Mike was able to finished the coding and this feature was later incorporated into the new release. Most importantly, our student Mike worked with Nate Sarr, IR+ software developer, and contributed coding to enhance the IR+. The new codes were incorporated into the new version of IR+ which was later released for use by the community.
- We would like to describe the progress of our IR project, how we have taken slow but steady steps to move our IR pilot forward to become a sustainable library service after the end of the MUSE program last summer.
- In this process, there are at least several action items that we have had to and will have to take care of.Getting support from the library administration is of course very important. Also, since our library is a faculty place, getting support from the library administration is only half the battle, so to speak. Getting support from the entire library faculty is equally and perhaps more important in moving the IR initiative forward. At the same time, working on and formalizing various policies and procedures are also important in developing a sustainable IR with minimal resources, because we cannot have a professional librarian working full-time on the IR and we therefore need simple, clear workflows to guide paraprofessionals and student workers creating metadata and managing copyrights and permissions. Last but not least, we will briefly touch on some of future plans needed to make the IR really fly, like collection development and campus outreach and buy-in.
- Support from the library administration and faculty. The Library Dean had been very supportive of our IR pilot efforts throughout the MUSE program. Following the successful MUSE project, we approached him to discuss ways to move forward a new IR initiative in the library. In response, he obtained some funding from Academic Affairs to hire a student worker for help with further IR development. Library faculty support is equally and perhaps even more important in our library’s organizational culture. We are a faculty environment where librarians are treated the same way as the teaching faculty and responsibility for librarianship, just like teaching, rests collectively with the library faculty. A new library-wide initiative could hardly fly even if the Dean himself had given the go-ahead and resources for the project. We have provided the library faculty with regular status reports, an IR demo, a Q&A document, etc. to keep them informed of IR progress and answer their questions. In the end, the library faculty has expressed support for IR planning as a new library initiative, and work is now in progress to develop an initial formal IR proposal with input and comment from the entire library faculty, so that the Dean can take further action on the IR initiative.
- In addition to working for support from the library administration and faculty, we have also continued our work on developing policies and procedures further to prepare for a sustainable IR, including a metadata application profile. A metadata application guideline is a local guideline that documents how information should be entered in each metadata element. This is a very important metadata quality control mechanism. Refining a metadata application profile was crucial to our goal of having a sustainable IR with minimal cost, because we wanted paraprofessionals and student workers, rather than professional librarians, to be in charge of creating or validating metadata records. For that purpose, we need to prepare clear guidance and documentation for them. During the last spring semester, we have also continued experimenting with the metadata creation and found that a student worker can handle routine metadata creation with good documentation.
- In addition to metadata creation, managing copyright and permissions is another important area that will need clear policy and procedure for a sustainable IR. According to a recent study noted here, libraries are often struggling with very elaborate systems to keep track of these details, such as e-mails, hard-copy printouts, and spreadsheets. In a Bepress webinar last April, one library reported that they had a librarian and a senior paraprofessional each spending 25 percent of their time on this task, assisted by student workers, using rather complicated in-house procedures. Since our library will never have such staffing available, we have a need for a simple copyright and permissions workflow that can be managed even by paraprofessionals and student workers. To that end, we have experimented with copyright workflows with a student worker using CORAL, an open-source ERM.
- CORAL stands for Centralized Online Resources Acquisitions and Licensing. This open-source ERM has been built and released by the University of Notre Dame library since 2010. Our Systems Librarian and Electronic Resources/Serials Librarian have been working and presenting on CORAL implementation since last year. Then, we realized that CORAL could be a good tool for managing IR copyright workflow as well and that we could just use what we already have in-house, which was a big plus given our limited resources.
- What’s next for our IR initiative? First, content recruitment is among the most critical elements to an IR. We have not done much yet in this area since our MUSE pilot project. However, like many IRs at smaller institutions, we expect that our IR will likely have a major focus on student work, reflecting the increasing emphasis at our college on deep student learning and intensive faculty-student collaboration in scholarly and creative activity. Also important is campus outreach and buy-in. We will have to plan multiple approaches to promote the IR as a unique library service, including faculty mailings and presentations, individual subject librarians’ outreach, and partnership with other campus units.
- In addition, we plan to do more to refine our copyright management workflow. If CORAL works, we might suggest to IR+ developer to incorporate it into the software for interoperability.
- Open-source software is not exactly free, as we need some server and staff time. However, even with limited local resources, our initiative has shown that it is possible for a core of committed librarians to create a foundation for the ultimate goal of establishing a sustainable open-source IR for a small academic institution. But in doing so, we have often found that we have to think almost like a small startup or entrepreneur, being flexible and trying whatever approaches that may work and whatever resources we have in-house, like CORAL. The picture in the right corner is taken from our college’s strategic planning material, because we feel that it is also a very good description of the ideal IR process map. Given limited resources and staff at smaller institutions, it is important not to aim for one big rollout. Instead, we need to quickly formulate a “good enough” plan and move immediately to implementation. Then, we constantly review your progress, adjust your plan, and move onto for a next incremental cycle.Last but not least, it seems essential that we never fear “failures.” In smaller libraries, it is so easy to feel that we are so busy as is and what if we fail since we have little time, resource, or staff to take on a new initiative. But that seems to be an entirely incorrect approach. First, we always need to keep in mind the larger mission and goal we want to achieve. If you see that the campus has IR needs and that the library has organizational and information architecture services that cannot be matched on campus, then the question should be, What’s the road ahead? What resources do we have in-house? How can we get to our goal one step at a time? By keeping our eyes on those ultimate goals and exercising some creativity, we feel that even smaller libraries can take on new initiatives with their limited resources.