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What did the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries do in the IMLS DSpace project?
How did the project team conduct the study?
Why the focus on grey literature?
How do faculty members use grey literature to keep up in their fields?
Are faculty needs currently met?
What do faculty members need in connection with their research activities?
How does DSpace meet the research needs of faculty members?
How is the University of Rochester enhancing DSpace to meet additional faculty needs?
Why build the Researcher Page and My Research Tools?
Why isn’t there much content in DSpace?
How can we get more faculty members to use DSpace?
Appendix: Probable types of documents, by discipline, that faculty may want to put into DSpace
The University of Rochester River Campus Libraries received generous support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to study how faculty members find, use, and produce grey literature and, based on this knowledge, to enhance the University’s DSpace digital repository to make it more useful to faculty members and more valuable to the University.
Principal investigators on the project were Susan Gibbons and David Lindahl. The project was directed by Nancy Foster, who worked with a team of librarians, a graphic designer, computer scientist, programmer, and cataloger throughout all phases of the project.
“Grey literature is that which is produced by government, academies, business, and industries, both in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishing interests and where publishing is not the primary activity of the organization” (Farace, D. Third Annual Conference on Grey Literature, Luxembourg, November 1997.)
The grey literature typically used by faculty members includes…
· Conference papers and conference proceedings
· Theses and dissertations
· Statistics and other data sources
· Technical reports
· Bulletins and newsletters
· Manuals
· Technical specifications and standards
· Bibliographies
DSpace is a newly developed digital repository designed to capture, store, index, distribute, and preserve the intellectual output of a university’s faculty in digital formats. The DSpace software was developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard, and is now freely available to research institutions worldwide as an open-source system that can be customized and extended.
Faculty members may use DSpace to store and make accessible their scholarly work. This may include grey literature, such as conference papers and technical reports, or it may extend to published work if copyright has been retained.
DSpace enables easy remote access and the ability to search and read items from one location: the World Wide Web. It also offers digital distribution and long-term preservation for a variety of formats including text, audio, video, images, datasets and more.
The team studied the work of faculty members using a “work-practice study” methodology. We went into workplaces and videotaped faculty as they did their work, asking them questions and having them show us how they found, used, and disseminated scholarship in digital formats, including both published material and grey literature. We augmented our videotaped interviews with telephone interviews of faculty and with additional information gathering among librarians. We focused mainly on faculty in the Departments of Economics, Physics, Political Science, and Linguistics, and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. As we gathered information we analyzed it individually and as a team and we brainstormed user needs and solutions.
Libraries have traditionally served to collect and preserve a wide range of scholarly and popular materials, mainly in paper, and make these works accessible to students, faculty members, and others in its community. As more and more work has been created and shared in digital formats, the library has continued its traditional roles while taking on a new role in making the work of its own researchers available to those outside its walls.
In support of its new role, libraries have begun to establish digital repositories that support self-archiving and self-publication by faculty members, including collection, cataloging, preservation, dissemination, and use of scholarly output. In other words, libraries are now “publishing” the work of faculty members. These publications mainly take the form of technical reports, theses and dissertations, conference papers and conference proceedings, presentations; that is, grey literature.
If the library is to provide a digital repository that will meet faculty needs and that faculty will use, we must understand how faculty produce, find, and use grey literature. This is why we have asked faculty members to show us the sites they visit, the work they find in databases, the ways they actually use these resources, and the ways they author and co-author their own work. One of the most important things we learned was how faculty member use grey literature to keep themselves up-to-date in their own fields.
According to our research, the main ways that faculty members keep up in their fields are…
· Browsing journals, often online
· Attending conferences
· Refereeing articles, again using web links
Conversations at conferences are a major means of keeping up for most of our respondents; telephone conversations and on-campus conversations are important for only a few.
In some fields, web-based services are more critical to keeping current. In some departments within our own university, we found that email exchanges, lectures, and specialized websites and databases are important sources of information. Physicists are in the vanguard with arXiv, the physics e-print service started in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and currently owned, operated, and funded by Cornell University. Initially a service for email exchange of scholarly papers in limited physics subfields, arXiv has had a web interface since 1993 and now serves the fields of mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology, as well as additional physics subfields. It is our belief that faculty members in other fields will become more and more dependent on institutional repositories to provide persistent and ubiquitous web accessibility, security, and permanent storage and usability for their digital scholarly output.
Our research shows that faculty members do not yet perceive what they need or how much they need it. To give clarifying examples, most faculty members we interviewed believe that their digital work is permanently and securely stored. They also believe that it is enduringly viewable and usable. Based on descriptions of their software platforms and backup systems, we know that this is not the case and that they are at risk of losing important digital material, either through crashes or deterioration of media, or through the disappearance of software platforms that they believe will be available and usable forever (for example, Word Perfect or MacWrite).
Every faculty member we contacted used resources in digital formats at least some of the time, produced their own work in digital formats at least some of the time, and shared their work in digital formats at least some of the time. Many of the tasks they perform with digital media go poorly, and faculty members resort to workarounds to obtain, read, create, use, store, and share documents. We are convinced that it is only a matter of time before these workarounds no longer provide adequate support and that faculty members will soon demand more sophisticated authoring and archiving services.
Based on our research, the following are the most common faculty needs in connection with research activities:
· Make their own work available to others
· Have someone else take responsibility for the server
· Organize their materials according to their own scheme
· Work from different computers and locations, both Mac and PC
· Have easy access to other people’s work
· Control ownership, security, and access
· Preserve digital items
· Make digital items permanently accessible
· Be sure not to violate copyright issues
· Work with co-authors
· Ensure that documents are persistently viewable or usable
· Keep everything related to computers easy and flawless
· Reduce chaos or at least not add to it
· Not be any busier
· Keep up in their fields
We want to point out that faculty members are almost universally passionate about their research interests and activities. When they talk about research, they talk about the questions that engage them, the colleagues who stimulate them, and the resources that inform or provoke them. Faculty members do not talk about repositories, authoring platforms, digital preservation and the like; those things are necessary but incidental and largely unspoken. What faculty members need is to be able to do their work. How that is made possible is not of much concern to most of them, as long as it works.
There are some things that DSpace already does that could make it easier for faculty members to do their work.
Out of the box, DSpace meets the following needs from the list in the previous section…
· Make their own work available to others
· Have someone else take responsibility for server
· Control ownership, security, and access
· Preserve digital items
· Make digital items permanently accessible
· Ensure documents are persistently viewable or usable
To the extent that other scholars make their work available through DSpace or other repositories, DSpace also makes it possible for faculty members to…
· Have easy access to other people’s work
· Keep up in one’s field
Clearly, this leaves many needs unmet. In other words, DSpace alone does not enable faculty members to do their work.
Even with DSpace, faculty members still have a need to…
· Organize their materials according to their own scheme
· Work from different computers and locations, both Mac and PC
· Be sure not to violate copyright issues
· Work with co-authors
· Keep everything related to computers easy and flawless
· Reduce chaos or at least not add to it
· Not be any busier
We recall here that faculty members have an interest in “doing their work” – conducting research, writing, talking with colleagues and reading their work. The more we can present a unified solution to all their needs for web-based services, the more we expect them to like and use the new system.
This means that in addition to the functionality already provided by DSpace, the system should also support…
· Document management
· Faculty control of their own output
· Flexibility in setting permissions and organizing files and documents
· Ongoing ability to use or at least view digital items
· Help with copyright
Our first enhancement to DSpace is two new pages: a “Researcher Page” and “My Research Tools.”
The Researcher Page is a personalized webpage that we will make available to any faculty member or staff author who puts work into DSpace. The Researcher Page will serve as the showcase for all of the researcher’s work. Anyone from any computer in the world should be able to search and find this page and see all the work that a researcher has self-published there. Additionally, the Researcher Page may include links to published work in DSpace or in online journals.
Each researcher will also have a My Research Tools page. This is the place where the researcher actually completes the tasks of self-publishing and self-archiving. My Research Tools will also support several kind of searching, including library catalog, OAI, and DSpace searches.
In the future, My Research Tools will also serve as the homepage for authoring and co-authoring, and it will become the hub for web-based services in support of faculty research. In other words, the My Research Tools and the Researcher Page will support a wide range of integrated activities that scholars conduct in their various communities.
Our purpose in enhancing DSpace is to support individual and institutional users. We are designing the Researcher Page and My Research Tools to benefit both kinds of user and to address two significant challenges with the current DSpace platform:
· Very few scholars at any institution have as yet deposited a significant amount of their scholarly output into DSpace
· Individual faculty members are beginning to experience the limitations of the workarounds they use to author, co-author, self-archive, and self-publish their scholarly output; they need better web-based tools
The Researcher Page and My Research Tools is our first step toward meeting the needs of individual faculty members. As an access point for self-archiving, self-publishing, and searching for scholarly output, it will immediately meet some real needs while we work to add functionality.
We believe that the Researcher Page and My Research Tools will make it much easier for faculty members to put their own work into DSpace and to find the work of their colleagues in institutional repositories. Our faculty respondents tell us that the effort of self-archiving and self-publishing will have been worth it when other scholars find, use, and cite their work. We expect we will have reached a tipping point when this happens, and that the use of DSpace will expand rapidly from then on, resolving the institutional challenge of filling DSpace.
What do the Researcher Page and My Research Tools look like?
The Researcher Page will support the following key tasks:
1. Finding and accessing a single researcher’s work
2. Getting contact information for that researcher
3. Getting professional information about that researcher
My Research Tools will initially support the following key tasks:
1. Putting items into DSpace and organizing them
2. Launching and editing the Researcher Page
3. Searching the library catalog, DSpace, and other databases and repositories
A graphic designer, a computer scientist, a software engineer, two librarians, and the anthropologist developed the design collaboratively, and we reviewed early designs with faculty members several times during the process to ensure that we were responding to their real needs. In the end, our graphic designer applied best practices to the design of the page while seeking to incorporate everything we had learned about our unique user needs and preferences.
A mockup of the Researcher Page is available online at: http://docushare.lib.rochester.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-13704/DSpace_People_SM_007.jpg.
A mockup of Research Tools is available online at: http://docushare.lib.rochester.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-13705/mytools009.jpg
See our paper from the Participatory Design Conference in Toronto, Canada, for a discussion of the research and design process. It is available in PDF format at: http://docushare.lib.rochester.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-13710/Participatory+Design+Conference+Paper+2004.07.31.pdf
DSpace has been available to faculty members at the University of Rochester for almost a year. In that time, few have shown interest. Why would that be?
According to our research, the major reasons are that faculty members…
· Perceive new systems and software as hard to learn and when you have learned them they change
· Don’t understand copyright issues
· Do not want to share their material prematurely, either because others will steal their ideas or data, or because others will criticize their work before it is completed and polished
· Are too busy
· When they are done with one piece of work they are on to the next thing and don’t want to back up
· Already think that their files are permanently and securely stored and backed up
· Never worry about a format, program, or platform becoming obsolete and unreadable
· Already have their work on a website and are not concerned about who is going to maintain the site in the long run
· Are satisfied that their digital work is permanent, whether this is the case or not
· Are not concerned about how people will find their work if they change its URL
We think that the key to attracting faculty to DSpace is to understand their perspective on what they do and speak to them in their terms. Specifically, this means acknowledging that what they most want to do is…
· Make their own work available to others
· Have easy access to other people’s work
· Work with co-authors
· Keep up in their fields
· Do all this with minimal effort and full support
Our approach will be similar in all the disciplines, except that we will use our research on grey literature to anticipate the different types of materials that faculty in different disciplines may want to put into DSpace. This list appears in the appendix.
We are currently preparing a new strategy and new promotional materials that will begin by identifying specific faculty needs and then explain how My Research Tools and the Researcher Page will meet those needs. We will post samples of our materials once we have tested them.
We will roll out our new strategy in three ways: 1) working with a small early-adopter group; 2) creating a wider content recruitment and user support structure; and 3) embedding DSpace into a larger research and writing support system for faculty. Details of these strategies follow.
1. Designating the faculty in one small department as “early adopters”
Four faculty members in a small academic department agreed to participate in our research project and evaluate prototypes of My Research Tools and the Researcher Page. They will be the first to have live, personalized pages and will participate in further usability testing. As they begin to use these pages, we will monitor their experiences, with a particular interest in the degree to which visitors are searching their pages and viewing their items.
The early-adopter department has close ties to two departments in different fields within our own university and with many departments in the same field at other universities. As early adopters use their pages with good results, we will explore how they can help us network to other prospective users, here and elsewhere.
2. Implementing broader library staff involvement in soliciting DSpace participation and supporting DSpace users
We are currently implementing a new content recruitment and user support structure for R-DSpace, the University of Rochester’s customized digital repository, that we hope will make it easier for us to reach out to faculty members and for faculty members to get the support they need from us, in person and virtually.
This new structure will entail the establishment of “library liaisons.” Library liaisons will receive preparation to assist in recruiting content for R-DSpace. They will meet with faculty members individually or at their departmental meetings to provide information about the benefits of R-DSpace and how it works. Library liaisons will also work behind the scenes after faculty members have begun the process of submitting work to R-DSpace by providing support in completing metadata and assigning deposits to appropriate collections.
3. Embedding DSpace in a larger research and writing support system for faculty
We envision a system that, first and foremost, supports our faculty members’ efforts to “do their own work” – that is, to organize their resources, do their writing, work with co-authors, and so on. Such a system will include the self-publishing and self-archiving features that DSpace already provides, and will rely heavily on the preservation, metadata, persistent URL and other features that DSpace offers. When we build this system, we will include a simple mechanism for converting work in progress into self-published or self-archived work, that is, moving work from a work in progress folder into the DSpace archive. We believe that if we support the research process as a whole, and if faculty members find that the product meets their needs and fits their way of work, they will use it, and “naturally” put more of their work into R-DSpace.
Art and Art History
· Images
· Conference papers
· Theses and dissertations
· Videos
Astronomy
· Theses and dissertations
Biology
· Conference presentations and papers
Brain and Cognitive Sciences
· Invited talks
· Videos
Chemistry
· Research proposals
· Conference presentations and papers
Computer Science
· Technical reports
· Conference proceedings (although commercially published)
Dance
· Videos
· Theatre and dance programs
Economics
· Working papers
· Theses and dissertations
Education
· Conference proceedings
· Research Reports
· Theses and dissertations
· Teaching materials
English
· Conference papers
· Invited talks
· Teaching materials
Engineering
· Patents
· Standards
· Conference proceedings
· Technical report
· Theses and dissertations
History
· Conference papers
· Theses and dissertations
Laboratory for Laser Energetics
· Technical reports
· Conference papers
· Data
· Theses and dissertations
· Preprints and eprints
Linguistics
· Dictionaries and grammars
· Audio and data to supplement published work
· Conference papers
Mathematics and Statistics
· Preprints
· Datasets
Modern Languages and Cultures
· Conference papers
· Theses and dissertations
Music
· Conference papers
· Theses and dissertations
· Video and audio of performances
Optics
· Material to supplement published work
Philosophy
· Conference papers
· Theses and dissertations
· Teaching materials
Physics
· Theses and dissertations
Political Science
· Working papers
· Data
Psychology
· Conference papers
· Tests
· Data
· Theses and dissertations
Religion and Classics
· Conference papers
· Teaching materials
· Theses and dissertations
Sociology and Anthropology
· Conference presentations
· Material to supplement publications
· Theses and dissertations
