Natasha Simons

New Roles, New Responsibilities: Examining Training Needs of Repository Staff

INTRODUCTION Institutional repositories play a critical role in the research lifecycle. Funding agencies are increasingly seeking an improved return on their investment in research. Repositories facilitate this process by providing storage of, and access to, institutional research outputs and, more recently, research data. While repositories are generally managed within the academic library, repository staff require different skills and knowledge compared with traditional library roles. This study reports on a survey of Australasian institutional repository staff to identify skills and knowledge sets. METHODS Institutional repository staff working at universities in Australia and New Zealand were invited to participate in an online survey which incorporated both open and closed-ended question types. RESULTS The survey found significant gaps in the current provision of formal training and coursework related to institutional repositories, which echoed findings in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States. DISCUSSION There is clearly a need for more and varied training opportunities for repository professionals. Repository work requires a specific set of skills that can be difficult to find and institutions will benefit from investing in training and ongoing development opportunities for repository staff. CONCLUSION The data from this study could be used to facilitate staff recruitment, development, training, and retention strategies.

Librarians as partners in research data service development at Griffith University

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the evolution to date and future directions in research data policy, infrastructure, skills development and advisory services in an Australian university, with a focus on the role of librarians. Design/methodology/approach – The authors have been involved in the development of research data services at Griffith, and the case study presents observations and reflections arising from their first-hand experiences. Findings – Griffith University’s organisational structure and “whole-of-enterprise” approach has facilitated service development to support research data. Fostering strong national partnerships has also accelerated development of institutional capability. Policies and strategies are supported by pragmatic best practice guidelines aimed directly at researchers. Iterative software development and a commitment to well-supported enterprise infrastructure enable the provision of a range of data management solutions. Training programs, repository support ...

Taming the Tasman: international interlending under the Southern Cross

Purpose – This article seeks to provide an update of two papers presented to the VDX Users Group of Australia and New Zealand during 2006. It aims to explore the issues associated with the implementation of Trans Tasman Interlending and its subsequent success, and is written primarily from a technical perspective.Design/methodology/approach – The first part describes the issues addressed, processes used and resolutions adopted in the period leading up to the go‐live of Trans Tasman Interlending. The second part provides a review of the first six months of operation.Findings – Trans Tasman Interlending has produced interesting results and is clearly more significant for interlending in New Zealand than it is Australia. This article looks at a variety of result areas and delves into the issues the linked service has highlighted.Research limitations/implications – While both countries have based their analysis on readily available report data, it is only in the Australian context that a formalised user surve...

Developing and training repository teams

This chapter focusses on both current skill levels and projected training needs to support the emerging landscape for repositories, which encompasses new types of content. The specific combination of job skills and knowledge sets required to work on a digital repository has implications for staff recruitment, development, training and retention strategies.

New content types in repositories

This chapter discusses a number of difficult challenges raised by the inclusion of non-text-based content in repositories. Increased multimedia content, for example, requires streaming, increased storage, and new types of metadata. It demands the capture of more extensive descriptive metadata than traditionally used to describe a book or journal article. Additionally, user expectations of the multimedia experience are typically greater than those of text-based content, owing to the enormous success of Internet multimedia channels. Content such as that generated from web archiving or contained in legacy collections may need to be considered. There is also an examination of the impact of research outputs, particularly datasets, on digital repositories.

Research data: the new gold

The management of ever-increasing volumes of digital research data is one of the most pressing challenges encountered by higher education and research institutions. In this chapter, we explore some of the complex issues facing institutions attempting to manage research data and the role of repositories in managing data. Considerations affecting the planning and developing of an institutional data repository are discussed, along with emerging alternatives to repositories, such as commercial journals. The growing culture of data citation is discussed and the chapter concludes with the case for open access to research data.

Repository statistics altmetrics

Repositories collect a variety of statistics incorporating content coverage and item usage. These statistics are of value to a range of stakeholders, including researchers, institutions, funding bodies and repository managers. Repositories also play a role in the scholarly communication life cycle, as they disseminate and make discoverable scholarly outputs. In recent years, scholarly communication channels have undergone transformation. In addition to traditional channels centred on formal publication, such as journal articles, scholars are making increasing use of a range of social media to discuss, share and promote their ideas and outputs. Additionally, the range of scholarly output has expanded to include other products, such as research data and multimedia.

Persistent identifiers for research data and authors

Persistent identifiers are critical in managing online resources. Without persistence, links to online resources are likely to break and resources be effectively lost. There are a large number of persistent identification schemes available for use in repositories and it is useful to select these against criteria that include uniqueness, trustworthiness, reliability, scalability, flexibility, and transparency to users of the scheme. The changing research landscape has included a swing to a focus on better management of, and access to, research data. Within this context, there is a growing international effort to improve citation of research data using the DOI system. Before implementing DOIs for research data collections, institutions will benefit from considering policy and related technical implementation issues, in addition to a strategy for communication with researchers to encourage data citation. Over recent years, there have been a number of significant efforts to better manage unique author identification. Unique identification of authors is critical in repository service fulfilment and in meeting user expectations. The difficulty with accurate author identification stems from a variety of factors, such as name variations and similarities. A solution to the problem is likely to involve the universal assignment of a unique, persistent identifier to each author of scholarly content.

Metadata schemas and standards for diverse resources

Metadata in institutional repositories are crucial for the discovery, reporting, preservation and sharing of digital resources. They provide a potential user of the resource described in the repository with a summary of information that helps them determine the usefulness of the resource. They help search engines and other web discovery services to find repository content and expose it. Over recent years the content of scholarly materials in digital repositories has expanded beyond the text realm to include increasing amounts of diverse resources such as multimedia, art, creative works, grey literature and research data. Such resources are ill defined in metadata schemas for text-based resources and there has been a proliferation of new types of schemas, both general-purpose and discipline-specific, to achieve the purpose of describing the new diversity of resources. In this chapter we will provide a brief introduction to metadata and Dublin Core, arguably the most commonly used metadata standard in repositories. We will then explore different metadata schemas for describing research data, people and organisations, multimedia and art.

Exposing and sharing repository content

Institutional repositories collect and expose scholarly outputs from journal articles to new content types, such as research data. The sharing of repository content with other service providers for the purpose of aggregation and discovery has always been a cornerstone of repositories across the globe. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is the traditional method for service providers to get metadata records from contributing repositories and is the easiest interoperability protocol to implement. However, it is not the only means by which repositories can contribute content to other services and new models for sharing and exposing repository content have begun to emerge that go beyond the traditional method. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the OAI-PMH, followed by a case study of implementation by a service provider, Australian Research Online. A discussion of the Griffith Research Hub as an example of a new model for repository metadata exchange is included as the second case study. The chapter concludes with a selection of discovery portals and directories with which repositories can register to expose their contents further.