| Question | Answer |
| When was repository launched? What was the impetus for starting it? | September 2008 soft launch. Colleen start January 2011. Outlet for faculty to share publications. Other institutions doing it too. Different Centers needed it for different types of output. |
| How did you decided on the organization of the repository? | Wanted to avoid traditional DSpace organization (departments/colleges) because didn't want empty collections. Potentially moving back to department style. UT Communities has misc bucket and had a lag when you click on it (read hierarchy before it loaded) in version 1.8; they upgraded and that removed the urgency. They also don't like the term UT Communities so probably organize it into departments, libraries, archives, museums, institute, and centers. |
| (follow up) Current collections include: conference proceedings, OER, student works, UT communities, UT ETDs, UT Faculty. What is difference between UT communities and UT faculty? | UT Communities is not faculty work, documentation from departments and units. Faculty works is primarily journal articles: sorted by department. |
| How did you decide on intellectual scope? | Leave scope up to units to determine what they think is worthy of going into repository. Accessibility is a must (i.e. transcripts have to be attached to video). No restrictions based on format; recommend open formats, no guarantees about closed formats for access. |
| How is work handled? How many people are involved? Can you tell us more about community and collection admin? | Colleen is primary point person/manager, drives outreach. One FTE that is the day-to-day manager who talks to depositors and getting content, organizing student workers (90% of time working on repository). 2-3 students work 10 hours per week. 1 paid graduate student also works 10 hours per week. |
| How do you populate the repository? (Harvesting, submissions, etc) / How much manual work/mediation is needed? | Mostly mediated deposit, people prefer it. Depositors send the content to them and they upload it. |
| Who can contribute works to the IR? We are considering alumni, is this something UT does? | Anyone who is interested, except student groups. Do not actively advertise but do offer it to alumni. |
| Why did you all decide to launch a separate data repository (Dataverse)? | There wasn't a good way to describe data in ScholarWorks. Had to be in final format. Not great for folks who are collaborating on data. Also, Texas Digital Library was going to be hosting Dataverse, so it was an opt-in situation. |
| No open access mandate? | Not for faculty, but yes for library staff. Mostly symbolic because librarians don't have faculty status. Grad students are also required to make dissertations open access. |
| Goals | Improve accessibility; include supplemental material and make them accessible. Also looking at usage of the repository. GA stats and DSpace stats are not accurate so they are working with Montana State for better statistics (RAMP). Use stats as outreach in flyer to hand out but they are questioned. |
| Rights? | Don't use rightsstatement.org. Don't use Creative Commons either. One metadata field to indicated whether an item is open or restricted. Submission form has CC option but skip it in mediation workflow. |
| Do you think that the IR has been successfully adopted by faculty and the campus community? | Successfully adopted by campus community but not faculty, not a failure because it still has been useful for everyone else. Article versions, too many steps that they don't have time for. Only about 3 faculty will upload themselves. |
| Do you do any kind of advocacy? | Targeted outreach (ussually 20-25 groups a year). Have students go through university website and see if there are centers/departments/colleges on campus that are creating content but are not providing access to it in a friendly way. Other way they get content is through liasions (in the process of talking about something else, there will be a trigger and it will come up). |
| What about data? Is there connection between data repository and scholarworks? Does the data repo get used? | Issue DOIs for everything to point back and forth between the two; pubs and data to have a pointer go back and forth but the submission software does not have a way to do that right now. Steady uptick with data repository, is fairly new. Broad use, primarily social sciences and humanities. |
| Issues where things cannot be submitted due to copyright | Talk to faculty about not sharing PDFs because they don't own the copyright to that anymore. Also collaborative research from various locations without explicit permissions. Depend on depositor to let them know about permissions. Have only had 2 complaints about copyright. |
| Retention policy | Vague and open-ended, "long-term preservation." Data repo is more specific (she thinks 10 years) |
| DMP mentions? | Some people are putting it in the data management plan and are specific about the preservation (ie 5 or 10 years post grant) |
| Do you have all your policies written down? | Yes! She will share with us. |