Digital Commons @ Winthrop launched in January 2015, 5 years later we need to reconsider how our metadata looks and functions not only in our repository but also in other platforms. In July 2020 Dacus Library migrated our ILS to Alma-Primo (Ex Libris), which has given us the capability to harvest our repository directly into our ILS. This session will discuss our current journey creating workflows between the repository and the ILS and between repository administrators and metadata and cataloging staff. We will also discuss ways to encourage stakeholders to understand the impact of their work on discoverability and search engine optimization. We will focus on archival records, theses, and oral histories as examples.

In late 2018 Pacific University made the decision to migrate its IR from BePress to Hyku (hosted by Ubiquity). The presentation will be an overview of the migration as a whole, as opposed to a deep-dive into one aspect of the migration. We will discuss how/why Ubiquity’s platform was chosen, the technical difficulties we encountered, and what we learned. Its aim is to give an example as well as explanation of how a small institution with an IR that also publishes journals and books successfully migrated away from BePress to another platform—which saved money, and had the additional benefit of no longer being connected to Elsevier.

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.

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.

Until fall 2020, the Computer Science department at Dartmouth College maintained an online collection of technical reports on their website. Faculty and librarians have worked together to transfer the collection to the school's institutional repository, Dartmouth Digital Commons. The project involved several major components: the creation of a space in the IR that met the specific needs of the collection, the transfer of existing materials so that the previous site could be deleted without losing any content, and the development of a workflow for adding future materials. In this presentation, the librarian responsible for the project will describe the process. The technical aspects will be briefly described, but the presenter will focus on the experience of communicating with faculty to adapt the IR to match their needs as closely as possible.

Institutions of higher education are becoming more aware of the need for content in institutional repositories to be digitally accessible, but improving accessibility can be a slow, difficult process with little additional funding or staffing given. This presentation will begin by examining the current landscape of accessibility and IR content, including the need for and advantages of digitally accessible content, the general lack of IR-specific accessibility efforts (with a few notable exceptions), and some conclusions about why this is the case. Next the presenter will describe measures to improve IR content accessibility that have been taken or planned at the University of Minnesota Duluth, in conjunction with the system-wide University of Minnesota IR, University Digital Conservancy. These measures include adding an accessibility statement to all IR records with information about requesting a remediated version, working with partners to increase the accessibility of original content, and developing and implementing remediation workflows for existing content. Issues such as adapting policies to support accessibility and ensuring the sustainability of these efforts will also be addressed, along with some of the major obstacles faced during this project. While the University of Minnesota IR runs on DSpace, this presentation is platform-agnostic and addresses the accessibility of IR content rather than platforms. The goal is to educate attendees about why digital accessibility of IR content is important and about some possible steps they could take or adapt to their circumstances to improve accessibility going forward. The presenter hopes attendees will share any experiences they have with IR content accessibility at the end of the presentation, to support a collaborative learning environment.

The purpose of this presentation is to share our experiences and to highlight lessons learned from the establishment of our institutional repository while collaborating in a state-wide initiative to showcase the scholarly output of New Jersey researchers. We will discuss how we collaborated with multiple stakeholders from across the campus to establish an open, discoverable, and sustainable resource, to support the University's vision plan and to connect users to our research in the digital age. Through the implementation of new technology, we preserve the history of our University and provide access to the intellectual capital of our faculty and students.

Detailed schedule for Northeast Institutional Repository Day 2020 (NIRD20) on Thursday, December 3, 2020. At-a-Glance and Abridged versions of the schedule are also available for download.