Increasing Participation in Your Institutional Repository

"So you’ve established an institutional repository (IR), where users can put papers, theses, and experimental data on file, making it easily accessible to the larger world. While getting an institutional repository up and running is no small feat, it’s only the first step. To make the most of this tool, you have to fill it, and that means getting ongoing participation from faculty and students.

While making information as broadly accessible as possible is a high priority for most librarians, the same can’t necessarily be said for all the faculty members producing that information. To drive participation by potential contributors, librarians have to show students and faculty what’s in it for them in addition to making a principled appeal. One way of doing that is helping to tie participation to things that already matter to academics, like tracking (and increasing) citations and other proof of usage of their work...."