Adapting the Library Repository to Accommodate Research Data, Publications, and Partnering with Researchers

Abstract

Brown University Library originally created the Brown Digital Repository (BDR) in 2011 to serve the digital content storage and dissemination needs of its Special Collections and Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS). Since then, the BDR has evolved to serve a broader group of stakeholders, including the science librarians, who deposit researchers’ data along with the supplementary materials underlying their publications, collections of data to comply with a grant-funder’s requirements for data sharing, and faculty publications. Some university library systems have created separate repositories for data, such as the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota. However, for libraries at smaller institutions, having a separate system for images, publications, and data may not be the most-feasible or affordable short-term solution. Over the last year, Brown’s science librarians and developers have been planning to make enhancements and changes to the BDR to improve its ingest, dissemination, and overall capabilities for preserving the long-term access of research data as well as make the necessary adaptations to the way that the BDR collects faculty publications, with the aim of it being a resource to help researchers with retaining their final approved manuscripts and complying with their funders’ public access policies. These shifts, from a focus on ingesting and displaying images to a focus on data and publications have exposed many issues and challenges that librarians considering adapting their existing repositories to accommodate data and public access mandates should hear. At the same time, the Library has been working with the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics to integrate its science librarians and repository infrastructure into grant-funded projects, such as an NLM Administrative Supplement for Informationist Services. In the second half of the session, Dr. Neil Sarkar, the Director of the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics, and Principal Investigator on the NLM Administrative Supplement, will provide a keynote address, which will cover: (1) faculty perspectives academic libraries should have in mind while adapting their repositories for tracking and making available their faculty’s scholarly output; (2) ways libraries can develop infrastructure to partner with their faculty on research projects and grant-funded initiatives, such as clinical and translational science; (3) ways that libraries could integrate their repositories into existing systems for recording scholarly output, such as My NCBI’s My Bibliography as well as systems for displaying researcher and scholarship ontologies such as VIVO; and (4) ways that libraries can adapt their repositories to provide meaningful analytics and metrics for measuring the impact of their researcher communities.