RoMEO Green at the University of Kansas: An experiment to encourage interest and participation among faculty and jumpstart populating the KU ScholarWorks Repository

Abstract

Universities around the world are beginning to develop digital repositories in order to offer new methods for the distribution and preservation of the intellectual output of their faculty. The University of Kansas (KU) is among these universities and is exploring ways to provide better access to and preservation of published and unpublished scholarly research created by KU faculty. The University’s institutional repository, KU ScholarWorks (http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/), entered into production in October 2004 with participation from selected departments and research centers and opened to all faculty early in 2005.

While the expectation is that faculty will self-archive their submissions through a departmental community structure, we initiated a project, RoMEO Green, to explore other staff-mediated options for content recruitment. This paper will address the steps taken thus far to populate the repository through this alternative process, the data collection methods, and early findings during the data analysis phase. We will discuss possible implications of these results for future directions of this project and for the larger mission of KU ScholarWorks. Project findings may be of interest to institutions considering different models for populating institutional repositories.