Leveraging Institutional Repositories
to Support Your Institution's
Strategic Mission
Richard W. Clement
Dean of Libraries
Utah State University
Utah’s land-grant university, founded in 1888
24,000 students; 850 faculty; four campuses
200 undergraduate, 90 masters, and 35
doctoral programs
Merrill-Cazier Library
 New facility completed in 2005, 305,000 ft2, nearly 2
million volumes, nearly 200 databases
 Automated storage and retrieval system with the
capacity for over 1.5 million new volumes
 Information Commons with 150 workstations and 35
group study rooms
An IR for USU
 2002, Library made first presentation to Deans’
Council
 2004, new head of digital library initiatives hired;
concentration on developing digital collections using
CONTENTdm
 2006-2007, acquired Dspace, developed collaborative
proposal with IT for an IR
An IR for USU:
A Traditional Approach
 Required hiring new staff
 Required new equipment
 Required extensive in-house development
 Required significant funding: $170,000 onetime;
$127,000 annual
Result: Not Funded
An IR for USU:
A New Approach
 2008, new Dean of Libraries
 Looked at outsourcing solutions: bepress
 Evaluated other DigitalCommons sites
 Developed a solution that required no outside funding
 Reallocated one position and identified $23,000 in
annual funding
Ensuring Our Success
 As a late adopter, we could see what has worked (or
not) for others
 Our approach would be Top-Down, starting with the
Provost
 Our approach would be institutional and inclusive
 Our approach would align the IR with the University’s
mission
Planning Our Success
Top-Down
 First Step: get the support of the Provost
 Second Step: get the support of the Deans
 Third Step: get the support of the Department Heads
 Keep up the pressure; maintain the momentum
Planning Our Success
Position the IR as Institutional
 Emphasize the multiple uses of an IR; deemphasize
the IR as a “Library Initiative”
 Yes, emphasize scholarship first, but also note all the
other institutional resources that can be made available
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Start with theses and dissertations
Honors Program senior theses
Research institutes’ reports and publications
University publications and magazines
Planning Our Success
Align the IR with the University’s Mission
We foster the principle that academics come first; we cultivate
diversity of thought and culture; we serve the public through
learning, discovery, and engagement.
Demonstrate how the IR supports the University’s mission
of Teaching, Research, and Service. A good case can be
made that the IR serves well these traditional elements of
the mission, but
the real strength of the IR is in its ability to collect, preserve, and
project the scholarly output of the University and make it available
to the people of the state and beyond.
Executing the Plan
 Completed internal Library plan for allocation of
resources and selection of bepress
 Gained the Provost’s support
 Brought in a David Shulenburger from NASULGC to
convince the Deans that an IR was necessary to the
University’s success
 Convinced the Deans to promote the IR to
Department Heads and to all faculty members
[the following 11 slides were produced by David
E. Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic
Affairs, NASULGC, for his visit to Utah State
University in November, 2008]
What would be gained if we
could distribute research to all
who wanted access to it without
damaging scholarly journals or
presses?
Imagine that each of these were
on-line and freely accessible:
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All Utah State faculty referred publications
All Utah State grant final reports
All Utah State federally funded data sets
All Utah State dissertations
All Utah State masters theses and senior honors
papers
 All Utah State Centers and Institutes related
publications
 All Utah State Extension publications
Imagine further
 That all this was available through a web
portal and readily identifiable with Utah
State
What Would be Different?
 For individual authors?
 For scholarship?
 For Utah State & its departments, centers
and institutes?
Different For Authors?
 More Visibility for Your Work
 More Citations of Your Work
 Therefore, more fame and fortune for you.
Different for Scholarship?
 Easier, More Complete Literature Review
 Reduced Probability of Reinventing the Wheel—
Less Wasted Time
 University Resources less Severely Restrict
Scholarship
 US
 Developing nations
More Rapid Development of Knowledge
Different for Utah State and its
Departments, Centers and
Institutes?
 Visibility Increases
 Recognition of Value Increases
 Perhaps—Some of the Increased Value
Becomes Tangible—More Funding
 Internal-A Little Less Paperwork & A Lot
More Accuracy
 Impact on Proposal Success?
So, What is Your Role?
 Place Your Stuff on the Utah State Web
 Develop Systems at Departmental,
College, Center & Institute to ensure that
the depositing routinely happens
 Recreate the Historical File as
possible/desirable
Role - Continued
Live by the Golden Rule
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Modify Copyright Requests
Publish in Open Access Journals
Make Sure Your Scholarly Society
Values Supporting Scholarship and
uses journal revenues only to support
its journal(s)
 Support Your Library’s Hard Decisions
Role Continued
Insist that “Public Goods”
Remain Public
 Support requirements that Scholarship
produced with Public Funds remain
available to the Public
 Especially support the spread of the NIH
deposit requirement to other agencies
Utah State could be the real
leader of the academy if it
affirmatively accepted a
research distribution obligation
and developed a complete
digital collection of its assets.
An IR for USU:
An Exceptional Result
DigitalCommons@USU launched in November 2008
How has it gone?
392 items in first four months; 2,433 downloads:
Electronic Theses/Dissertations
Print journal (Marginalia)
New USU online journal using Edikit
OpenCourseWare
Faculty publications from ITLS Dept.
Grant project (ADVANCE) Library
Government documents
Where are we going?
Short-term
Coming online in the next 4 months: Undergraduate Honors
Theses, Intermountain West Religious Studies Journal, Utah
Science Journal, OpenCourseWare full download of courses,
Government Documents, Electronic Resource Licenses,
ADVANCE Library
Articles/Pubs: Library, Instructional Technology & Learning
Sciences, Psychology, Animal, Dairy, Vet Science
NASULGC
A Public University Association
On February 6, 2009, the Executive Committee of the
NASULGC Council on Academic Affairs unanimously
endorsed the following resolution:
Campuses should initiate discussions involving
administration and faculty about their current practices
and/or intellectual property policies in order to promote
and assure broad access to and dissemination of
research and scholarly work produced by faculty.
Where are we going?
Medium-term
In response to the NASULGC statement, Deans’
Council on March 23 will be devoted to a discussion of
scholarly communication issues and in particular,
DigitalCommons@USU
We have applied to bring the ACRL Scholarly
Communications 101 Roadshow to USU
We will host a daylong symposium on September 30
Institutional Repositories: Disseminating,
Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship
Where are we going?
Long-term
 Keep the momentum going
 Make the IR indispensible
 Establish a Center for Digital
Publishing: The public face of the IR