Developing a Comprehensive Faculty Bibliography to Facilitate Scholarly Communications Outreach

Abstract

In 2016, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) began compiling a faculty bibliography in order to keep a comprehensive record of and showcase the institution’s research. Published in the institutional repository and positioned as a central project of the Scholarly Communication Initiatives (SCI) department, the bibliography serves as a marketing tool for the repository, open access, and research impact outreach, while also providing partnership opportunities across campus. Existing literature discussing faculty bibliographies frequently frames workflows around existing knowledge of programming to create these databases. Many scholarly communication departments don't have programming staff, or their access is limited to a campus and/or library IT department that cannot dedicate themselves to such a project. This was no different for UNLV, where the workflows for the bibliography were designed utilizing records obtained from faculty activity reporting software and research databases, often in spreadsheet format. The project was designed to establish the repository, and in turn the library, as the authoritative showcase for the research and creative efforts of UNLV faculty. During this session, we aim to discuss the lessons learned along the way, including missteps and obstacles, staffing changes required, improvements on the horizon, and ways we’ve needed to adapt workflows over the years. We will also discuss what resources we used (such as adapting examples from other institutions, OpenRefine, and campus stakeholders to obtain faculty annual self-reported scholarship data), and the methods we’ve used for assessing the success of the bibliography project (response rates and deposits, downloads from the institutional repository). Attendees will also be able to learn about how they could implement a similar project using their institutional repository and what they, and their institution, could gain by doing so.