Faculty engagement and readership activity (Google group 11/2015)

Hi Kim,

Thank you for sharing such excellent suggestions!  Would you be able to supply a little more information about #2?  How did you identify the specific collections?  Did you scan the Brockport website in search of collections, and then asked the webmaster for usage stats?  Did the webmaster send you URLs of Brockport pages that contained many pdfs & jpgs, and then you identified what would make a good collection for your IR?  In other words, what should I ask my kind webmaster to do? <grin>

Thanks again for your help!

Kind regards,

Tim

-- 

Tim Gritten

Assistant Director of Libraries for User Services

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Milwaukee, WI 53201

414-229-6200

From: <digitalcommons@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Myers, Kim" <kmyers@brockport.edu>
Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2015 at 8:54 AM
To: hmabry <hmabry@gardner-webb.edu>, Digital Commons <digitalcommons@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [Digital Commons], Faculty Engagement and Readership Activity

Holly,

Congratulations on embarking on this exciting journey! Brockport’s IR will be 4 years old in January, and I am still seeking new ways to engage with my faculty and students. Here are a few ways that worked for us:

1.      Find a champion early on, perhaps someone in a department you are liaison for, or have other previous contact with (mine was a professor from Environmental Science, and it lead to a signature collection, two webinars we co-presented at (and Ann still loves to show Joe’s picture and use his quotes in her webinars), and one of our first master thesis collections

2.      Make a friend of your college webmaster – they can refer collections to you that are stale on the website, but have lasting archival value

3.      Find ways to keep the repository out there – use social media to tweet new collections, facebook to share updates, a blog….

4.      The Paper of the Day is a wonderful way to reach out one on one to your contributors. Here’s an example: recently a 1974 journal article from a very famous philosopher turned up as our PotD. I sent him the “hey – your article is our Paper of the Day – this is what I do about it (social media) – maybe you’d like to, too” spiel. The philosopher, Peter Singer, tweeted it out to his followers, and I think it got retweeted something like 35 times – but more importantly, it was fascinating to watch pin after pin drop as people downloaded it. There were more than 300 downloads that day alone.

5.      Another marketing tool – do you have a daily college newsletter? Ours is called the Daily Eagle, and I watch it like a hawk (haha), and contact faculty who have presented or published, and ask if they would like it posted in Digital Commons.

6.      Celebrate your victories along the way. We had a 1000^th download celebration our first year, and invited and recognized some of our early adopters. (Sadly, our 1,000,000^th download excited only me, Paul Royster, and my personal cheerleader – Lauren – who is my intrepid bepress CSR.)

7.      Finally, don’t get discouraged! Continue to add new collections, and don’t forget student work. For us, that is where the bulk of our readership comes from.

8.      Remember, your CSR (client service rep) at bepress is your partner, and the rest of the Digital Commons community are here to support you, through this listserv and webinars and the collaborator.

Please feel free to contact me, if I can be of any assistance. It’s a great journey, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

Kim L Myers

Digital Repository Specialist

2014 bepress IR All Star

http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/

44K, Drake Memorial Library

The College at Brockport, State University of New York

585-395-2742

(PS – The answer to your second question – real time downloads – for us it was 3.5 years, 5000 papers, and 1,000,000 downloads that marked the tipping point from so many a day to live pin drops. Another metric that happened at the same time was reaching 2,000 downloads a day. )

From: digitalcommons@googlegroups.com [mailto:digitalcommons@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of hmabry
Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 2:56 PM
To: Digital Commons
Subject: [Digital Commons], Faculty Engagement and Readership Activity

Hi all,

My institution's repository is still very new, just over a month old.  I'm taking this semester to see how things pan out in terms of collection ideas and faculty response.  Is there a time of year that you find particularly good for marketing the repository's services to faculty?

My second question is, how much content, and at what point do you start seeing regular real time download activity on the readership map?

Thanks,

Holly Mabry

Digital Services Librarian

Gardner-Webb University