While having a controlled vocabulary for our IR was an aspiration, with limited staffing and ad hoc additions, it was not a priority. Some items were added with keywords, most often supplied by faculty focused solely on their subject area, and others had no keywords. It seemed with every addition, the idea of implementing—and more importantly editing earlier submissions—slipped further away. However, when the shift to remote work meant that staff needed projects, many items on the IR wish list became a reality, including the controlled vocabulary. During this session, we will walk you through the process of how we assessed what we had, implemented order, and made a plan of how to maintain (and expand) the controlled vocabulary going forward. You will hear about what worked, what did not, and how we turned our 2020 lemons into some pretty sweet IR lemonade.

For many institutions, the brass ring is to upload as much into their institutional repository as possible. There are plenty of hoops to jump through to achieve this goal—copyright permissions, scanning, metadata, etc.—but the work doesn’t end once the item is posted. If scholarship is posted in an IR, but is never promoted, will it have any impact? Institutions and authors need to take a proactive approach to drive people to the IR. Social media—mainly Twitter—is an excellent tool to achieve that end but poses its own challenges. How should an institution choose what scholarship to share? How do you support faculty who want to share their scholarship, but are wary of social media? How do you build a network to amplify posts directing users to your IR? What happens when, in the process of promoting their work, faculty create new scholarship? While this session can’t provide all the answers, it will provide the foundation for an outreach strategy that can be tailored to different IRs and their institutions. After this session, attendees will be able to: Identify IR content that will translate well to social media; Articulate why their institution and faculty should use social media to promote scholarship in the IR; Develop support materials to encourage using social media; Locate other social media accounts that can amplify posts.

You know how great your IR is going to be, but how do you convey that to the faculty and administration at your institution? That was one of the challenges the Cardozo Law Library faced as we started working on LARC, our Digital Commons repository, and building out Digital Commons. The challenge of appealing to two distinct groups (with plenty of sub-groups) was just the beginning. From the initial discussions of what an IR is and why open access is important to determining how the platform could be best utilized to encompass all scholarship to laying out workflows and providing realistic expectations, we championed LARC. Find out how we crafted LARC’s mission, reached out to faculty, and aligned ourselves with institutional objectives to get everyone (mostly) on the LARC-bandwagon.