Writers Forum Open Access Project

In late October, 2015 I received notification that I was awarded a $1500 Harold Hacker Award Fund for the Advancement of Libraries. Here is the budget narrative:

The funding would be used to hire an intern for 300 hours @ $12.00/hr, who would first update the 2007 inventory to determine the current state of the collection. He or she would then build a showcase collection on Brockport’s open access institutional repository, Digital Commons@Brockport (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/), and move 40 existing audio files currently behind a firewall in iTunes, 22 existing video files found on SUNY’s DSpace platform, and 18 existing digital files that are stored on local hard drives to this site. Metadata would be added to enhance the discoverability of the collection, and the catalog records would be created or updated, and links would be updated on the departmental and library webpages. Historical posters, programs and other archival material would be scanned to round out the collection.

While I asked for $3600, I received less than half of that. Since the premiere goal was to create an online, open access collection that is what I will have to focus on. 

 

Social media experiences

The Peter Singer story:

I’m guessing you know who Peter Singer is, having taught philosophy, so I’ll jump right in with the story. Late this summer, we received a request from a publisher to reprint an article (by Peter Singer) that appeared in the 1974 edition of the Philosophic Exchange. This is the first time that we’ve received such a request when it wasn’t on behalf of the author of the article. In those cases, it’s an automatic yes. In this case, I searched out Dr. Singer, who was still active and teaching at Princeton, and sent him an email explaining the situation and telling him that (although we held the copyright), we were passing this request on to him. Whatever remuneration there was, should go to him, as well as the decision as to whether he wanted his work to appear in this forthcoming publication. I quickly received a nice note back thanking me, and saying he would respond to the request. Then, last week, that same paper came up as our Featured Paper of the Day, and I tweeted it, and sent him my congratulations PotD email. He immediately responded, and tweeted it himself. Almost instantaneously there was a flurry of activity on the website, and people all over the world started downloading this article. We had more than 300 downloads of that article in the next few hours. It was fascinating to watch those pins drop.

Establishing the alumni connection:

This next story is chronicled below. When this month’s Activity Updates came out, I identified 5 or 6 people, whose works were in part responsible for areas in which the repository excelled in the previous month. Several were from the Education department. For each of those, I sent a little congratulatory email (as seen below) to the author, and copied their advisor in, as well. Finally, I sent a summary on to Janka, the department chair. I was pleased to see that Frank, one of the advisors, followed up with his own email to the student. I think that one will mean more to Karen, than anything I could send, and it represents to me another way that Digital Commons can help build and maintain connections with Brockport’s alumni.

All this being said, I know I don’t do nearly the amount of marketing or work in social media that I did in the early days of the IR, but experiences like these convince me that the time is worth the effort!

Correspondence with Geneseo re: repository policies

Being Brockport, we didn’t really have a lot of policies in place when we started the IR. So my answers will be a combination of policy and practice.

On whether submission is mandatory:

Our first thesis collection was the Environmental Science and Biology collection, which came out of a discussion with a professor, who was also chair of the graduate committee at the time. They started requiring their students to submit to them their thesis on CD, along with their print copies to be bound. The Education department came along next, and they were open to the idea of actually having the students submit their thesis to Digital Commons, and the advisor would do a final approval and it would be published. About a year into the repository initiative, the Graduate School submitted a proposal to the College Senate asking for it to be mandatory that theses that would normally be submitted to the library for binding, be submitted digitally to the IR. The department could still bind, if they wished but the IR was the primary depository. Has that been adhered to? Marginally. It continues to be an educational process, but I believe the 3 biggest departments comply.

On how we receive permission:

Our thesis collection is two pronged – retrospective and born-digital. The born-digital collection has a click through agreement that the student checks before they submit their thesis. Here is a link to the instruction guide (found in the sidebar of each collection) http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/ehd_theses/submission_guide.pdf that we provide each department. It works the student through the process step by step, and shows a piece of the permission agreement. For our retrospective theses, we digitize and try and find emails to ask permission to upload. This tends to be time consuming, and I admit that I have many more theses digitized than I am currently able to upload, so I have put a moratorium on doing any more at this point. We have a Thesis Digitization Policy, based on University of South Florida’s listed on our website http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/thesis_digitization_policy.pdf .

Creative work and other lessons learned:

As some of the original champions have retired or moved away, questions have arisen such as: we don’t want our students research published before we get a chance to publish (the sciences), or what about work that isn’t quite good enough to be in the IR, or what about if the student wants to publish in the future? So, just about a year ago, we started allowing embargos (one year automatic for EnvSci, and one year renewable for Bio). Some of the creative writers who gave permission have come back with individual requests (could I take this down – I think if Mrs. XXX read it, they might sue me for libel; I want to self-publish- it is allowed if it’s on the IR?) Those kinds of questions. I offer to provide a link in the metadata to their “published” book. English gives their graduates a choice of whether to submit or not, in fact, I’m not sure that they even tell them about it, to be honest.

Is it worth the time and effort?

I’m not sure which platform you are thinking about for your IR. We have been very happy with bepress and Digital Commons, but here’s my caveat: you will get out of it, what you are willing to put into it. If you look at the 5 IR’s in the http://suny.researchcommons.org/ , 3 of us started at about the same time. Only one of us has a full time IR manager and the difference in size of collections and number of downloads is noticeable. But, it depends on what your goals are for the IR. I consider Digital Commons a part of the Brockport marketing plan, and align my goals with the strategic goals of the college, and the strategic goals of the library.

I’m sorry, you ask a simple question, and I answer with an essay. Please let me know if there is anything else you need to know.

Kim

From: Allison Brown [mailto:browna@geneseo.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2015 12:17 PM
To: Myers, Kim
Subject: Question about Digital Commons

Hi Kim,

We were beginning a conversation about IRs with a faculty here at Geneseo, and I was wondering if I could ask some questions about your experiences with the digital repository at Brockport.

I noticed you have a fair amount of student theses and dissertations available through digital commons, and was wondering if you had any insight into how individual departments handle this. For example, is it mandatory, and do the students sign a release? 

We are also curious if any of the theses you host are creative writing, and if so, what were the discussions leading up to including these types of student work in the repository. Our faculty member is advocating to include all types of student work, but has heard some arguments against providing open access to unpublished student creative work, and I was curious whether this was a conversation you had at Brockport while setting up policies for Digital Commons. 

Any insight you have would be helpful! 

GVSU Author recognition information

Hi Kim,

It was great talking to you this morning. Here is the link to the full PDFs of the bibliographies, http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/ar_archives/. And here is the link to the event community in our repository http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/author_recognition/.

 I quick looked and GVSU has a total of 1678 faculty members for reference. 

Thank you for your kind words about our repository, it looks like you’re doing great things at Brockport as well!

Let me know if there is anything else I can share with you. 

Jackie

Jacklyn Rander

Publishing Services Manager

Grand Valley State University Libraries

240 Mary Idema Pew Library

616-331-2623

Best Practices for Creating a Successful IR Day

Best Practices for Creating a Successful IR Day by digitalcommonsblog

Josh Cromwell, Institutional Repository Coordinator of The Aquila Digital Community at the University of Southern Mississippi, shares best practices for creating a successful IR day:

• Gather collaborative campus-wide support, including funds for the day’s activities.
• Request a recognized keynote speaker and other leaders in the field to participate.
• Remember that you only need one willing institution in a region in order to create a community-wide IR day.

Josh was originally inspired by the emphasis at ACRL's 2014 Scholarly Communication Roadshow on the key importance of IRs in today’s scholarly landscape. If the University of Southern Mississippi was leading the IR movement in the region, Josh reasoned, “it seemed logical to me that we should leverage that opportunity to provide training and workshops for the other universities who were also interested in pursuing an IR of their own.” Indeed, the day became an inspiration to USM’s peers in the Mississippi region.

In creating the first Southern Mississippi IR Day in 2015, Josh spoke to the importance of a collaborative campus-wide effort to support the hosting institution:

“The Libraries generously provided most of the funding needed to make the event happen, and the Friends of the University Libraries generously provided funding to purchase lunch for all attendees. The day included a panel discussion with faculty members from each of our six academic colleges across campus, and several participants in our current IR initiatives also agreed to come and speak about their projects and experiences. This broad base of participation really enhanced the quality of the day's presentations.”

The addition of a recognized keynote speaker and the participation of other leaders in the field also helped to offer a high level of discourse and lively sessions. Josh details their experience:

“We were tremendously honored to have Marilyn Billings from UMass Amherst agree to be our keynote speaker for the day, and in addition to her riveting keynote, she and Jeanne Pavy from the University of New Orleans each led incredibly helpful workshops during the afternoon session.”

Josh reports that “the response to the first IR Day has been overwhelmingly positive”—congratulations!—and many attendees are already looking forward to the next IR Day. In addition to the best practices above, the 2015 Scholarly Communications Experts Directory can help connect organizers with experts who may travel to their campus to partner in creating an IR Day. Feel free to contact outreach@bepress.com with any questions.

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

Thoughts on the new departments, and adding a survey to our cover pages

1. Since the Dept. of Health Science ( http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/hls/ ) is splitting into two new departments, I definitely agree that it’s good to establish a workflow for how to handle similar situations. I think it’s great that you’ve already noted this in the introductory text.
- We recommend reviewing a discussion on this topic in the Google Group: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/digitalcommons/cewmhdniCgI/w-npbnYFqigJ (Harrison’s Inefuku’s referenced papers are at http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/digirep_conf/1/ and http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/digirep_conf/2/ )
- Regarding the Department of Health Science community, it’s important to consider whether you’d like to keep this community present or hide it from the communities.html page, but it’s up to you.
- Since you said you don’t yet have content for the two departments, you can hold off on creating them for now and simply note the Department Chair information in the Introductory Text for this community (or even list them both in the one field). However, it can be helpful to consider either: A) Creating only the communities for each and noting that content will be forthcoming or B) Creating publications and collecting content from the relevant publications.
- I also want to mention that there may be some fields in your repository called “Department” with a drop-down list. We’re always happy to add new departments, so let us know if there are any publications that you’d like updated.

2. Regarding adding a survey to PDF cover pages, we can absolutely support adding a link. First you’ll want to create your survey using a campus or third-party website, and then provide us with a link, how you’d like it to read, and where it should appear. If we add it to the PDFs, we will regenerate the PDFs in the repository for you.

11/24/2015

Effective July 1, 2015 the Department of Health Science is now two separate units…

Department of Healthcare Studies (Patti Follansbee is the chair)

Department of Public Health and Health Education (Jennifer Boyle is the chair)

Can you create those two new units.   After each could you state ‘Effective July 1, 2015’. 

For the ‘Health Science’ that already exists, could you state (prior to July 1, 2015).  That way we don’t have to separate the entities.

Also, could you create a Dean’s collection?  I have several things I would like to upload but they’re more for the School, rather than a department.