2014 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2249.1/67018

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"Think Different"
(2014-04-15) Coyle, Karen
Library practices are based on a rich history covering centuries of expert knowledge. That's the up-side. The down-side of that rich tradition is that there is so much of our practice that is based on "We've always done it that way." This talk will challenge you to "think different" about common practices and begin to imagine a very different library.
Inside the Digital Public Library of America
(2014-04-15) Cohen, Dan; Digital Public Library of America
DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen goes behind the scenes to discuss how the DPLA was created, how it functions as a portal and platform, what the staff is currently working on, and what's to come for the young project and organization.
Conceptualizing and implementing a webinar series: lessons learned from the Mountain West Digital Library Webinar Series
(2014-03-14) Cummings, Rebekah; University of Utah
Webinars are a low-cost and efficient training model that allow librarians to disseminate valuable information, connect with colleagues, and build and expand their communities beyond geographic and institutional boundaries. Yet, while many information specialists attend webinars on a regular basis, the task of hosting a webinar series may seem like a daunting and opaque challenge, even for enthusiastic webinar participants. In this poster session, Rebekah Cummings, Outreach Librarian at the Mountain West Digital Library, will demystify the process of implementing a successful webinar series including content creation, recruiting guest speakers, software selection, promotion, hosting the webinar, and follow-up. This session will include practical advice on how to host a webinar or webinar series, the costs and benefits associated with hosting webinars, and lessons learned from the Mountain West Digital Library’s Webinar Series.
Who is Using Online Special Collections? The CUL Digital Collections Case Study
(2014-03-14) Boeke, Cindy; Southern Methodist University
Since 2008, Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) Central University Libraries (CUL) have digitized, cataloged and made available on the CUL Digital Collections web site some 35,000 image, text, video, and audio files from the holdings of its rich special collections. Since their inception, CUL’s digital collections have received more than 4 million page views from users around the world who access thousands of objects that portray Texas history, art, and culture, as well as Mexico, the U.S. West and Southwest, Latin America, Europe, the Civil War, World War II, railroads, and SMU history. CUL uses a variety of methods to track who is using our 40 digital collections, so we can prioritize future digitization projects and ensure our scarce resources are used more effectively. Google Analytics, for example, provides a vast array of data that can be mined and analyzed to determine trends and popular topics on a local, national, and international basis. It is relatively simple to count numbers in terms of page views and visits to the web site. What is more difficult to document are outcomes, or the ways CUL Digital Collections are being used to change fields of sudy or are having an impact on people's lives. To better understand outcomes from our digital collections, CUL has developed a user survey that is sent to researchers who license images, so we can determine how digitized items are being used to present new insights into fields of study. Other efforts are underway to push items out in a variety of social media, including Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Wikipedia, Flickr: The Commons, Twitter, and more. The results, which are often surprising, help us uncover how CUL Digital Collections are changing people’s lives. This poster will provide examples of innovative ways people and communities around the world are using CUL’s digitized special collections, data that has opened our eyes to unanticipated topics of interest to the public, and tools that are helping us build new audiences for digital archives. The overall topic for this poster was also discussed at a Birds of Feather session at Digital Frontiers, Denton, September 2013, entitled “Digital Collections Usage: Analyzing Data and Documenting Outcomes”. This poster will provide much more specific examples, along with update information.
Unifying Digital Collection Software: Considerations at Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México
(2014-04-16) Rivera-Aguilera, Alma Beatriz; Cortés, Eduardo; Juárez, Efraín; Morales, Gerardo; Universidad Iberoamericana Cuidad de Mexico
Nowadays digital collections managers face situations like: collection managed with different software, different content formats, different user needs, need of having a unique search box for all the resources, give the user the opportunity to choose from diverse interface options, availability of mobile interfaces, digital preservation, scholar and institutional culture regarding digital repositories. This paper refers to how the Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero from Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México is facing this challenges with the evaluation of the proposal of unify its digital collection management software and the technical and human implication of this proposal. Some of the preliminary conclusion is the need of doing research about local user needs, the implementation of technical solution taking into account not only interfaces but also preservation issues and the necessary involvement of all stakeholders in the final decision.
Transforming Access to Texts with 18thConnect and TypeWright
(2014-03-14) Grumbach, Elizabeth; Texas A&M University
18thConnect is a digital aggregator and virtual research environment (VRE) for eighteenth-century researchers. As part of a larger community of VRE’s, all organized under the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) and based on the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) model for peer review and scholarship, 18thConnect has to tackle issues relevant to its period-specific research community. As a result, the TypeWright application was built for the 18thConnect platform in order to provide an easily-accessible, crowd-sourced correction tool for eighteenth-century texts. The TypeWright tool was designed to solve issues with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for early printed texts, specifically those in Gale/Cengage Learning’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) subscription database, to provide accurate text for full-text searching, data mining, and the creation of digital scholarly editions. Because these texts were photographed, microfilmed, and then digitized over a period of 40 years, their quality negatively impacts OCR text output. In addition, early printing conventions, especially early typefaces and paper quality, cause OCR engines to mis-recognize the word images on a page. To foster the sustainability and use of these texts in scholarship, TypeWright was created to enable users to correct, by hand, save, and share their editing with the 18thConnect community. For this poster presentation, I intend to focus on illuminating the following three aspects of the TypeWright tool: 1. Correcting a text in TypeWright, or, briefly explaining the accessible user interface. When a user accesses the 18thConnect site, they can search for “TypeWright-enabled” texts, right now consisting of the 183,000 documents contained in ECCO. Once a user has selected a text, they are ported into the editing interface, which displays snippets of the page image for transcription in the text editing box below. The text editing box already contains the text generated by a previous OCR process, so that the user can either edit the text, or confirm the current text is correct. 2. Liberating a text in TypeWright, or, how users can request full text and XML for a document after completing correction; After a user, or a group of users working collaboratively, have completed correcting a document, their work is reviewed by TypeWright administrators. If the work passes the evaluation process, then the user(s) are able to receive the corrected plain text or XML/TEI-encoded files. If the work fails evaluation (which is rare) users are instructed to look for common “correction” mistakes, and fix them. 3. Using a text after TypeWright correction, or, the benefit of crowdsourcing correction for the academic community. Once a user has received their corrected text files, 18thConnect administrators advise users to use this data in their digital project, then submit that digital project for peer review to 18thConnect. In addition, the corrected text, per our agreements with Gale/Cengage Learning, return to that database to improve the searchability of this proprietary product, which constitutes an important resource for the eighteenth-century scholarly community.
Texas Documents: What are They Good For?
(2014-03-14) Schenk, Krystal; Downing, Jeff; University of Texas at Arlington
Although some people might have thought to use these documents as fuel to keep warm this past winter… UT Arlington Libraries has decided to digitize a core collection of legacy documents produced by Texas state agencies. What seemed like a straightforward project: select documents, scan and upload to our institutional repository – quickly became a complex project. Problems included creating a comprehensive list of our state document holdings, mapping titles and agencies to degree programs, and deciding which titles were candidates for scan to destroy vs. scan to retain, and how to use existing metadata from our catalog to populate the institutional repository metadata. Early successes include developing a better understanding of how to find holdings for state documents and building a closer working relationships with our Special Collections, systems and cataloging units. A possible outcome of this project could be the creation of a statewide collaborative where individual institutions would choose to become a “center of excellence” for a particular state agency. Based on ASERL’s Collaborative Federal Depository Program, institutions would take responsibility for collecting, digitizing and making available the works of their “adopted” agencies.
Texas Cowboy Churches: a Collection of Oral Histories
(2014-03-14) Ellis, Ann; Stephen F. Austin State University
The poster exhibits a project that is collaborative in nature, and unique in that it features a small demographic group not widely represented in current research. The project showcases primary resources for researchers in the areas of religion and Western American cultural heritage. The Center for Digital Scholarship at Stephen F. Austin State University Library manages a variety of collections in its digital repository. The Texas Cowboy Church Oral History Project, a part of the Library’s Oral History Collection, is a unique collection that highlights a selected group of Cowboy Church members and pastors. The series of interviews and oral histories was conducted by Jake McAdams, a graduate student in the Public History program in the Department of History at SFA. His work preserves the idiosyncratic practices and attitudes of those affiliated with Cowboy Churches in Texas. Jake visited Cowboy Church members in several Texas locales and interviewed them with questions designed to explore their background and feelings regarding religion, and the reasons they selected a Cowboy Church as their religious community. His interviews provide interesting primary source material for the study of a growing religious and cultural phenomenon. The Center for Digital Scholarship worked with Jake to design and implement the digital presentation of his research project, and created the structural and descriptive metadata for the collection.
Sharing Research Broadly: Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) at Texas A&M Universit
(2014-03-14) Hammons, Laura; Texas A&M University
The Three Minute Thesis (3MT®), initiated at the University of Queensland, Australia, is a competition in which graduate students attempt to convey the impact of their research to a general audience using compelling words and delivery – and, in just three minutes. Prompted by the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools, with the inclusion of a regional 3MT® competition at its 2014 Annual Meeting, Texas A&M University organized a campus-wide effort to promote, educate, and host a 3MT® competition. The 3MT® provides an excellent opportunity to promote graduate student thesis/dissertation research in transformative ways, while providing professional development to graduate students on the fine skills of orally and visually communicating the purpose and impact of their research to the world. As students generally engage in 3MT® efforts prior to or parallel with completing their degree programs, it also holds the potential – through collaborations among the Graduate School, Library, and others – to demonstrate to graduate student participants the value of scholarly communications, enrich the electronic thesis and dissertation with video that is more broadly appealing, etc. While Texas A&M University has only begun to consider these possibilities, the success of our first 3MT® competition holds promise for future initiatives. This poster will introduce the 3MT® program at Texas A&M University and consider the elements necessary for developing a successful initiative.
Re-Engineering a Website Into a Digital Humanities Project - We Think!
(2014-04-21) Johnson, Lynn; Holmes, Ramona; University of Texas at Arlington
What happens when you have a website that needs a facelift and you want to evolve the contents into a digital humanities project? What makes it different? This poster session explores a process we are attempting at the University of Texas @ Arlington Libraries. Taking an amazing collection of US-Mexico War materials in our Special Collections, harnessing high collaboration with our Center for Greater Southwestern Studies, and re-imagining a website has been a six month process that tapped into an academic partnership and internal re-organization. We invite you to examine our painful process that used a project with no documentation, a small web presence, and completely new personal in a brand new unit. Learn from our unpleasant experience so you never have to go through this yourself!
Pushing the Boundaries of Open Access
(2014-03-14) Alemneh, Daniel; Phillips, Mark; Kleister, Jill; University of North Texas
The Open Access (OA) movement has become increasingly important in shaping the ways that academic libraries provide services to support the creation, organization, management and use of digital contents. The University of North Texas (UNT) has embraced the open access movement and seeks to bring scholarship to the widest possible audience. Our usage statistics show that users from more than 200 countries around the world visit the UNT Digital Libraries’ diverse collections. Theses and dissertations represent a wealth of scholarly and artistic content created by masters and doctoral students in the degree-seeking process. The University of North Texas (UNT) was one of the first three American universities to require electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) for graduation, and by 1999 all theses and dissertations submitted by students in pursuit of advanced degrees were digital. We are intensely proud of the work of our students. Currently, more than 90% of UNT’s ETDs are freely accessible to the public via the UNT Digital Library, while less than10% have been restricted by their authors for use by the UNT community only. In light of supporting academic institutions initiative to advance digital scholarship for worldwide research, we started a new project contacting UNT alumni who restricted their ETDs in perpetuity. We contacted about 700 ETD authors, asking their permission to remove the restrictions from their theses or dissertations and make them openly available in the UNT Digital Library. This poster provides a preliminary analysis of the UNT‘s efforts to make students’ work accessible to a wider global audience.
Providing a Spatial Context for Library and Archival Collections: Mapping Historic Aggieland
(2014-03-13) Weimer, Kathy; Olivares, Miriam; Rice University; Texas A&M University
Libraries and archives have large collections of historic maps and photos. Creative digital exhibits allow users a unique framework to these collections, with mapping platforms providing a spatial context to collections and serving as a visually appealing browse mechanism. Librarians and staff from the Map & GIS Library at Texas A&M University used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to present “Mapping Historic Aggieland,” a digital collection of historic maps, aerial photos, and photos of significant sites and buildings on campus. These materials, which span a century, are gathered to tell the story of the growth of the university over 100 years. GIS is used to display the digitized copies of the maps in georeferenced form, and photos in their correct geographic location on campus. Users, from alumni to current students make use of the digital collection and gain understanding of the expansion of the campus and styles of architecture over the years. Archival photos of campus buildings include the dates that they were built which allow the user to browse the collection over time period using a time slider. Esri’s ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Viewer for Flex were used to create this web service, and will be described. Other lightweight mapping tools will also be reviewed for those wanting to create a similar exhibit for their library or archival collection.
The Power of Collaboration: Creative Opportunities with Faculty
(2014-04-07) Wills, Faedra; Downing, Jeff; University of Texas at Arlington
With the growth of digital humanities, e-science and other web-based initiatives, there are many new and exciting opportunities for librarians to collaborate with faculty and the community. For the past couple of years, UT-Arlington (UTA) library staff have worked with faculty on the occasional digital project, but those tended to be small in scale with limited long-term benefits. In the summer of 2013, the library went through a reorganization. One of the outcomes of this reorganization was the establishment of a Digital Creations department. As a result, staff now have the time and the tools to collaborate with faculty on larger and more complex digital initiatives. This presentation will look at two recent staff/faculty collaborative projects here at UTA: the creation of an university alumni military veterans website and the publication of an international educational journal on the OJS platform. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the projects and discuss how these projects originated; our success stories and lessons learned to be applied to future projects.
Harvesting Quality: Evaluating Metadata for Digital Collections
(2014-03-25) Biswas, Paromita; Western Carolina University
Metadata creation practices for digital library projects vary widely amongst libraries. Digital library projects often have to deal with multiple metadata creators, new formats and resources, and dynamic metadata standards for different communities (Park & Tosaka, 2010). As a result while accuracy and consistency in metadata are prioritized by field practitioners, metadata records created for specific digital projects may lack the quality needed to support successful end-user resource discovery and access. Park and Tosaka’s survey of metadata quality control in digital repositories and collections reveal that digital repositories often rely on periodic sampling or peer review of original metadata records as mechanisms for quality assurance (Park & Tosaka, 2010). This poster proposal presents another means of running quality checks on metadata created for digital projects based on Hunter Library’s experience with the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway tool used for harvesting metadata for digital collections into WorldCat. Hunter Library’s digital collections are described using Dublin Core in Contentdm and the Library has recently started harvesting its collections into WorldCat using Gateway. During harvesting the Gateway, by default, places the names of “creators” and “contributors” recorded in separate fields in the local metadata environment into one broad “Author” field for WorldCat users. A cursory review of this “Author” field in WorldCat for several harvested items from one of the library’s collections revealed an unexpected presence of corporate body names alongside personal names. Consequently this led to an evaluation of how the “creator” and “contributor” fields had been used in that collection. The “Frequency Analysis” feature in Gateway proved to be particularly useful in this evaluation since it provided a breakdown of each field in a particular collection by the values used in that field and the number of times they had been used. For example, a high frequency usage of a particular name indicated that the usage had not been a random mistake but had been consistent. A subsequent analysis of the library’s digital collections’ metadata using “Frequency Analysis” revealed that for some collections, the “contributor” field had been used to record entities whose roles, in relation to the item described, spanned from publisher, printer, editor, or recipient of letter. However, the library’s then current metadata schema had limited the definition of the “contributor” field to entities who had a direct but secondary role in the creation of an item like editors or illustrators. This discrepancy between the library’s metadata schema and the usage of the “contributor” field led to a redefinition of the role of the “contributor.” The schema now incorporates the plethora of roles that “contributors” could have in relation to an item and recommends that the role of each “contributor” be explained in the “description” field to account for the diversity of roles. Updating of the schema has thus promoted consistency in recording the “contributor” field across the library’s digital collections while also possibly benefitting users searching for an item by the various names associated with it.
Digitizing the Fred Fehl Dance Collection
(2014-03-25) Weathers, Chelsea; Mitchell, Jordan; Roehl, Emily; Harry Ransom Center; University of Texas at Austin
The Harry Ransom Center’s performing arts department holds two vast collections of photographs by Fred Fehl—a prolific mid-twentieth century photographer of theater and dance based mainly in New York City. The Fred Fehl Theater Collection and the Fred Fehl Dance Collection each contain tens of thousands of 5 x 7 prints of various productions by multiple companies. For the past six months, a team of employees, interns, and volunteers has been working to digitize and catalog 5,000 of the 30,000 photographs in the Fred Fehl Dance Collection. Once digitized, the images and their metadata are uploaded onto the Ransom Center’s new digital collections website, which uses the platform CONTENTdm. Providing access to Fehl’s photos of dance productions, which run the gamut from the classical offerings of the American Ballet Theatre to Martha Graham’s groundbreaking modern dance, is a significant contribution to the fields of dance history, art history, cultural studies, and costume design. No other online library or archive currently provides images of Fehl’s photos in such breadth or depth, and the Ransom Center is in a unique position to do so because it holds the copyright to all of its Fehl photographs. To execute the complex task of preparing the photographs for digitization, the performing arts curator Helen Baer, her associate Chelsea Weathers, and graduate interns Jordan Mitchell and Emily Roehl developed a workflow that entails two main streams. One focuses on the creation of consistent metadata, and the other focuses on the digitization of the photographs. After the institution of the workflow, undergraduate work study students and volunteers also began to contribute to the project. To date, nearly 1500 photographs from three different dance companies have been uploaded via CONTENTdm to the Ransom Center’s digital collections website. Access to this enormous collection of visual materials will be an invaluable resource for dance scholars, enthusiasts, historians, and the general public.
Did We Scan That Book Twice?: Weeding the Texas Tech Dark Digital Archive
(2014-03-25) Winkler, Heidi; Texas Tech University
The Texas Tech University Libraries' digital collections began in 2004 with the intent to digitize as many books as possible in the name of open access. By the fall of 2013, that mission had been revised to focus on the preservation of materials unique to Texas Tech. We decided it was not in the institution’s best interest to devote resources to files in our digital dark archive that did not meet this mission. Using the HathiTrust catalog as our guide, we set out on an online trek to discover just how many digitized books being preserved on our servers were, in fact, distinct items not held elsewhere. Along the way, we tackled questions of to what do we provide access on our DSpace versus archiving on our servers and just how unique is "unique"? Weeding a digital resources library requires a different process of consideration than the weeding of a physical library. Further, we used this project to refine our digital archiving and preservation practices, the most important of which was the establishment of an archive change log.
Developing a Library Open Access Portal That Bypasses the Need for Authentication
(2014-03-25) Herbert, Bruce; Potvin, Sarah; Ponsford, Bennett; Highsmith, Anne; Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University was established as Texas’ only land grant university through the First Morrill Act (1862), which sought to provide a broad segment of the population with a practical education that had direct relevance to their daily lives. Our impact on society was later expanded through the creation of the agricultural experiment stations and the Cooperative Extension Service, which disseminate the results of experiment station research to improve the state’s agricultural industry. The Sterling C. Evans Library at Texas A&M is building upon this history to help bring all of Texas A&M’s scholarly work to bear on many of society’s greatest challenges by promoting open access. We are working to identify and advance appropriate information systems, practices, and policies that improves societal access to the scholarly and creative work at Texas A&M. The Texas A&M University Libraries, has begun work to design a portal that bypasses the need for authentication and allows a user to search through a collection of open access materials. Working with Ex Libris, the vendor from which we license our Primo discovery layer, we have installed a separate instance of Primo aimed at aggregating open access materials and making them accessible to the public. This dedicated portal will draw materials identified as open access from the Primo Central Index, a “meta-aggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources of global and regional importance,” including “journal articles, e-books, reviews, legal documents and more.” We are currently working to have OAK Trust open access items harvested into Primo Central and made available alongside harvests from other institutional repositories. In establishing this Portal to Open Access Resources, we will also work to identify materials that are legitimately open access (gratis) and that meet basic quality standards. This poster presentation will discuss the technical aspects and policy decisions made during the design and implementation phase of the project, and show how the portal supports a Texas A&M University – K12 School District reforming their science, technological, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.
Collection Size Descriptions as Archival Data: The Spectrum of physdesc
(2014-03-25) Buchanan, Sarah; Li, Haoyang; University of Texas at Austin
This poster presents insight into the functional vocabulary with which repositories describe the physical extent of their collections. The structured standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) has provided repositories with a XML basis for representing archival finding aids since its creation and adoption during the 1990s. As one measure of its widespread adoption by collecting repositories, consider that the nationwide corpus of ArchiveGrid currently comprises over 120,000 EAD documents. The public database Texas Archival Resources Online similarly facilitates discovery of historical collections by displaying the contributions of EAD-structured finding aids from Texas repositories. The current version of EAD consists of 146 elements – an EAD tag and its formal element name – which provide the basis for these structured descriptions of collections. In this research we focus on one component of collection description, the tag, and report on the range of format types that appear in Texas collections. Beyond the colloquial names of box, photograph, and painting exist many outlier terms which present unique challenges and opportunities. The variation within the tag may be painless to the human reader during display, yet becomes problematic during natural language processing which requires normalization of collection sizes in order to perform statistical analysis. Through the one element of Physical Description, repositories are charged with summarizing both the materiality and the quantity of the items contained in an entire collection. These descriptions speak to the physical form and enumerative values of all information artifacts in the collection through the use of four optional subelements: dimension, extent, genre characteristic, and physical facet. We demonstrate the effect of having relative leeway in terms of data structure requirements built into the formal definition of this element. Because "the information may be presented as plain text," the end result of this definition is a dataset with wide internal variation that could impede the goal of assessing such collections through actionable data and its reuse in a broader context, such as by repository or region. With the third EAD Revision currently in gamma release (and set to replace EAD 2002 this spring), we consider our study in parallel with the following two developments: the continuation of the element as an unstructured option, and the creation of a new element which will formally adopt, rename, and add a fifth subelement to the four optionals listed above. In addition to version compatibility, EAD developers and adopters should facilitate integration of the legacy data corpus alongside data requirements to meet the dual goals of analysis and discovery. The Visualizing Archival Data / Augmented Processing Table project, of which this study is a part, aims to understand how such finding aid data can reveal the quality and granularity of collection arrangements, and through this, the layers of historical evidence that are made available to researchers seeking resources on specific topics, people, and organizations.
Centralized to Scattered: Designing Project Workflows for a Dynamic Staff
(2014-04-04) Wills, Faedra; Schenk, Krystal; University of Texas at Arlington
How can staff collaborate on digital projects when they are dispersed throughout the library? This is the challenge the new Digital Creations department was faced with after a library wide reorganization in the summer of 2013. In 2011, the UT Arlington Libraries began mining faculty CVs for articles that we could add to our local institutional repository. After the re-organization the staff previously working on this project were now scattered between three departments. By leveraging the project management features of the newly adopted tool SharePoint, we are able to distribute the work of this project across staff, and departments. In this presentation we will demonstrate how we are using SharePoint’s workflows, custom lists, task lists and shared calendars to help keep staff informed, generate reports and manage projects. In particular, we will show how we use these features to help keep staff on task, and faculty informed of our progress.
Beyond Web-based Scholarly Works Repositories: The effect of institutional mandates on the faculty attitudes towards Institutional Repositories
(2014-03-25) Tmava, Ahmet Meti; Alemneh, Daniel; University of North Texas
In the last decade there has been a push from academic institutions to encourage faculty to deposit their work in web-based scholarly work repositories, commonly known as institutional repositories (IR). IRs are responsible for collecting and preserving the intellectual works of faculty and students and making them widely available. In light of the ever-evolving landscape of higher education, IRs seek to move beyond the custodial role and actively contribute to the advancement of scholarly communication. Understanding and addressing the issues faced by IRs requires a multidimensional approach that involves all stakeholders including: individual scholars and researchers, academic institutions and librarians, scholarly and scientific society publishers, commercial publishers, and government institutions. However, most researcher (Kim, 2010) agree that the main players are faculty members that can make-or-break an IR. In spite of the fact that IRs are an innovation in scholarly communication they have been met with a resistance from faculty members. Academics have been slow to embrace the concept of IRs, according to recent studies by Primary Research Group (2014), only 5% of journal articles published by the faculty members of the organizations have been archived in the IR. While a range of factors seem to influence use of repositories by researchers there is still no agreement how to resolve the challenge of getting authors to deposit content. The most recent survey by Nicholas et al (2014) suggested that while the size and use of repositories has been relatively modest, almost half of all institutions either have, or are planning, a repository mandate requiring deposit. However, Crow (2002) warned that faculty submission will have to be voluntary or risk encountering resistance from faculty members who might otherwise prove supportive. The current situation of IRs is rather bleak and calls to question the effectiveness of the current ways of recruiting content, including institutional mandates. Nicholas et al argue that mandates vary based on the research community and/or institution. Their findings reveal that none of the participating institutions reported any attempt to force researchers to comply with the mandate and describe the current mandates as more educational rather than binding. The same study concludes that 22 percent of the researchers were directly influenced by mandate to deposit their work, and this varied based on the age. Thus, the hope remains that with the mandates in place the new generation of researchers will get used to the idea of depositing their work. This poster will revisit the content recruitment issues in general. Although there is an extensive body of relevant knowledge, discussions about IRs transformations, they are often based on opinion, and isolated experience of commentators, leaving out the main issue (i.e. institutional policies) and the main players (i.e. faculty). This paper will attempt to assess the effect of institutional mandates on the faculty attitudes towards IRs. We believe that analyzing and spotlighting the possible correlations between and among various factors are pertinent for understanding and shaping the ongoing transformation of IRs.

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