Communication Tips
One of the most difficult and time consuming aspects of starting a digital repository is getting faculty to deposit their articles. In the article Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories researchers at the University of Rochester Library studied faculty work processes and came up with the following list of what faculty want:
- Work with co-authors
- Keep track of different versions of the same document
- Work from different computers and locations, both Mac and PC
- Make their own work available to others
- Have easy access to other people's work
- Keep up in their fields
- Organize their materials according to their own scheme
- Control ownership, security, and access
- Ensure that documents are persistently viewable or usable
- Have someone else take responsibility for servers and digital tools
- Be sure not to violate copyright issues
- Keep everything related to computers easy and flawless
- Reduce chaos or at least not add to it
- Not be any busier
When introducing the digital repository to faculty, emphasize the ways it can support their work and make their lives easier. Some of the terms used by librarians to describe the benefits of a repository may not appeal to faculty.
As you start to add material to the repository, provide regular updates to authors about how often their items have been downloaded.
Try varied approaches, treating the repository as a long term marketing project.
Grey Literature can be a great category of material to add to your repository, this document from the University of Rochester library lists the most popular types of grey literature for various academic disciplines.
