Libraries launches 'UR Research'
nthropologist Nancy Fried Foster recently took a close look at the research habits of Rochester faculty with the goal of determining why many do not take advantage of online resources for storing and sharing scholarly work. Foster discovered that just because you build it doesn't mean they will come, especially when the it is an online repository.
A team at the River Campus Libraries has taken Foster's findings and applied them to refine its electronic system. The result: "UR Research," a repository designed with faculty work habits in mind that offers researchers an outlet to easily post scholarship to the Internet in a format that is searchable by others.
The findings from the work-practice study, which were published in the January 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine, show the need for librarians, graphic designers, and computer scientists at River Campus Libraries to rethink how to present and promote access to online repositories.
"When we observed how faculty research and write, we found that the current system was cumbersome and it didn't make sense to the scholars we wanted to attract," says Foster.
The technology that allows work to be stored and then made available on the Web is called DSpace--for Digital Space. It was designed and built by Hewlett-Packard and MIT to capture, store, index, and distribute finished work. The University's new customized repository is built on DSpace and incorporates enhanced features to meet users' needs.
"There are institutional repositories for scholarly work all over the Web, but they'll remain just a set of empty shelves unless the quantity of the content grows," says Susan Gibbons, assistant dean for public services and collection development at Rush Rhees Library and coauthor of the D-Lib article.
Individual faculty members can now create a personalized researcher page and post work that's been written or published. Users also can organize their work into folders and add their own links. (At a later stage, the team hopes, faculty will be able to author and coauthor documents from that page as well.) The researcher page in UR Research can link to work that is already kept elsewhere on the Web, or faculty may choose to put copies of their work into the UR Research repository as well.
"The researcher page will serve as the showcase for all of the researcher's work," Foster and Gibbons write. "Anyone from any computer in the world with an Internet connection should be able to search and find this page and see all the work that a researcher has self-published there. . . . The focus should be on the individual, with the emphasis on personal digital repositories rather than on institutional repositories."
Faculty members may register and submit their work to UR Research by going to http://urresearch.rochester.edu/register or by contacting urresearch-help@rochester.edu.
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