This presentation will focus on the flexible, reusable resources that Bentley University librarians have created in order to increase rates of faculty submission to our Digital Commons site. We wanted to develop an approach that would emphasize individual communication, provide easy pathways for faculty participation, and remain sustainable for a small team with no dedicated digital scholarship staff.

To this end, we decided to offer CV reviews and assisted submission to any interested faculty through a series of semi-automated steps. First, we created & vetted a “one-and-done” style contributor agreement form, allowing us to accept submissions from a faculty member without repetitive signing requests. We developed a series of stock emails and LibGuide pages that would allow us to respond to different questions and levels of faculty involvement. We also started a centralized spreadsheet to track faculty contacts among library team members & set automatic dates for each follow-up step.

Perhaps the most important part of this toolkit is a macro-powered spreadsheet that we created which can ingest a CV/resume and extract journal titles and dates of publication. This allows us to conduct extremely efficient permission checks using Sherpa/Romeo. Since many faculty members publish in the same journals, we are also able to use the spreadsheet to find publications that we have already researched and duplicate the appropriate permissions information.

Our presentation will discuss the development and implementation of these resources in a way that is generally applicable to other individuals or teams trying to create sustainable workflows on any platform. We will also share data on time savings and changes in the rate of submission, to the best of our ability.