A competition for IR deposit.
In one of my (many, many) idle trains of thought, I wondered about how to increase institutional repository uptake. This was definitely inspired by the recent posts here and here, suggesting that perhaps IRs are a dead end - not just because there are better models out there, but because IRs are currently implemented very badly.
I tend to prefer the ideas of a disciplinary repository (which opens itself to unaffiliated scholars) and of building everything on the same platform for easy portability, when people change institutions or disciplines (which happens more in the humanities than sciences, but it does happen). And I especially like the idea of an integrated repository with data-archiving and open-data functions. But for now, I’m going to leave my ridiculous, unworkable ideas behind and just think about IR engagement.
I won’t rehash others’ points about this: what I’m going to do today is just map out an idea I had that perhaps others might put into place. If you do, let me know. The goal is to drive IR deposits with a game - and an incentive.
The rules: Each department at the educational institution (or each school in the disciplinary repository, or each segment/group/what-have-you that could be defined) is assigned an FTE headcount (this is the bulk of the preparatory labour in this scenario).
At the end of the allotted period (one month, three months, six months) the department with the highest number of deposits per capita wins!
This isn’t, of course, a straight count of deposits; that would skew badly towards established researchers. Instead, here’s a scoring system:
Two points for each peer-reviewed (journal or conference) publication from the past five years
One point for each publication between five and ten years old
A half-point for each publication older than that
A half-point for presentation slides, datasets, book chapters, and other works
This scoring system is designed to level the playing field between departments with late-career faculty and those with newer staff. The upsides are that it fills your IR with newer research, rather than older and less useful work, and it saves participants from trying to figure out the vagaries of copyright on that 20-year-old print-only publication in that now-defunct journal with mysterious stewardship.
I’m sure this system has ways of being gamed, but I’d advise against anything more complicated; ease of use is the key here. Some basic guidelines on how copyright works and how to check if your publication can be archived would be handy to link to, of course.
The prize? Not just bragging rights. I assume your library has some sort of outreach platform, whether it’s an email blast to all faculty members, or the liaisons do department-specific blasts, or you have some blogs, or display fields on the website. The prize for the winning department is that they get months and months of specialized focus on their work - the work in the IR, with any luck, will be research of some quality and breadth. Your job is to promote the shit out of it.
Write up summaries of interesting papers, point out themes in what’s been contributed, tease out conclusions in those papers that can be relevant for other fields. Find ways to relate what’s in the IR to the world outside.
Better yet, get deeply familiar with the topics so you can whip a paper out as a response to current affairs. Spend the rest of the academic year learning about that discipline, finding their best academic blogs and social media feeds, and working to show your own learning based on their IR contributions. Then cram all that stuff down the throats of the losing departments. Make them jealous as all hell. Make them yearn for that level of campus-wide coverage. Then announce it’s time for next year’s contest. (Previous winners can’t win again, not for three years.)
Will tiny or new departments who are working for greater respect and representation want to take advantage of this free publicity? I mean, I don’t know, but from being in those types of departments, I hypothesize they will. Especially if they’re branded as interdisciplinary or cutting-edge: they’ll want to have other departments know what they’re all about and see where collaborations and cross-departmental efforts can happen. Will more entrenched departments have existing rivalries that this contest will exploit for your benefit? I mean, I don’t know, but probably.
This will, of course, require you to be a good reader, researcher, and writer. If that’s off the table for you, don’t even bother. If your library has no methods whereby it communicates new services and events to your faculty, forget it. You probably aren’t set up for IR success in the first place.
But for the rest of you, with any luck, this competition shouldn’t cost you anything other than time (although cash prizes to departments are certainly worth asking management about). If it’s successful, you shouldn’t have to do any intensive labour other than tallying FTE and playing Better Know A Faculty.
This can be deployed as an introductory game, upon release of your IR, to drive initial deposit, but would benefit from a fully fleshed-out IR with researcher profiles, usage statistics, citation/bibliography generators, embeddable feeds, and all those other obvious-sounding things that are nevertheless add-ons. You want people discovering the IR for the first time to find it in all its functional, beauteous glory.
If your IR keeps count (accurately), you can follow it up with a second contest to see which department can drive up their stats the best (so, both a deposit contest and an access contest).
This also skews towards younger scholars who have more likely embraced social media earlier and have a bigger following, or do academic blogging. It could even inspire a few more hesitant scholars to finally take that big step into scholarly social media.
The obvious payoff is driving people to your IR, both within and outside of the department. Getting researchers familiar with their IR-offered metrics is a bonus here, while hopefully changing a few “publish it and forget it” mindsets along the way. Suggest people revisit their earlier work with new insights and developments: those practices are good for even the most entrenched faculty members.
A note about the only example I know of gamifying: Iowa State handed out digital badges. I think badges are kind of a dumb method of engagement, or at least not a particularly appealing one. I’m not a badge-collector personally, so that’s just my opinion - but I think there are rewards out there that scholars really care about (mainly exposure and attention) that can be delivered by librarians with even part of a finger on the pulse of their institution.
