Populating the KU ScholarWorks Repository: the RoMEO Green Project

Abstract

Institutional repositories have become part of a system of scholarly communication that includes faculty, librarians, and publishers. The University of Kansas is exploring ways to provide better access to and preservation of published and unpublished scholarly research created by KU faculty. The Libraries, along with Information Technology, initiated an institutional repository pilot in the fall of 2003. The focus of the pilot was to gather information from early adopters that would assist in developing an institutional repository program. The pilot did not measure success in terms of items contributed to the repository, but rather by the quality of feedback from early adopters and other invited participants. KU ScholarWorks <http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu> has recently entered into the production phase with participation from selected departments and research centers; it will open to all faculty early in 2005. While we expect faculty to contribute their own content, we realize the importance of having content available in the system as quickly as possible. KU ScholarWorks will only be an institutional repository when its contents are representative of the vast research output from the many disciplines at KU. Therefore, KU Libraries have initiated a project, dubbed “RoMEO Green” that will explore other options for content recruitment. Drawing on the University of Glasgow’s work, we intend to post to KU ScholarWorks on the authors’ behalf those articles (pre- or post-print) that meet publishers’ criteria. The steps we will have taken thus far in the project to populate the repository and the results to date will be discussed in this presentation. The project goals are to: add content to KU ScholarWorks; explore services we might offer faculty in support of KU ScholarWorks; generate data for assessment; and create an interest in, and demand for, an institutional repository at KU. We will conclude the presentation with a discussion of how the project might impact the future development of KU ScholarWorks.