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Digital Preservation - Part I
Introduction
When promoting institutional repositories (IRs), there is often a disconnect between librarians and their faculty. Emphasizing escalating journal prices, open access mandates, and collection building, librarians tend to approach faculty scholarship as an organizational resource to be managed. In contrast, faculty are often focused on issues such as tenure, career development, and academic freedom. Their scholarship is a personal activity which represents their accomplishments and contributions. Unless librarians conscientiously work to bridge this values gap, institutional repositories can flounder, sitting empty and underutilized.
One strategy librarians can use to connect with faculty is to focus on supporting them in the dissemination of their scholarship. Going beyond traditional research support, librarians have the opportunity to engage faculty throughout the scholarly communication life cycle. Using the services available through institutional repositories, librarians can consult on copyright and journal selection, offer alternative publishing mechanisms, assist in making published works openly accessible, create customized researcher pages, and provide publication and usage data. Creating and utilizing management models that ensure the delivery of these types of IR services can not only provide a needed infrastructure to assist in these efforts, they can also help showcase the value and impact of the university as a whole.
Background
In 2007, Dr David Shulenberger provided remarks to the 151st Association of Research Libraries Membership Meeting. During his presentation he discussed a survey he had conducted of provosts, asking if their universities had strategies for disseminating the scholarship they produced. Only a handful of those surveyed were able to provide any kind of affirmative response. Yet at the same time, Shulenberger noted that when provosts did offer a strategy, it often only included faculty evaluation criteria, which for most universities consists of a tenure system ([15] Shulenburger, 2007).
The dissemination of research results is typically left up to the individual professor. As Shulenberger found, few universities have mechanisms in place to assist faculty in sharing their scholarship and ensuring the broadest reach possible. Additionally, tenure systems promote publishing in peer-reviewed publications as the only acceptable avenue for sharing one's work. Yet, despite their discipline expertise, many professors do not have the time or experience to fully understand issues such as negotiating copyrights, evaluating journals, or using alternative publishing...