Growing an Institutional Repository: Leveraging a Citation Database as a Tool for Sourcing Deposits and Conducting Outreach

Abstract

Many institutional repositories continue to struggle with low engagement. A combination of factors is often at play, including overburdened faculty, confusion about copyright, and lack of awareness. Adding to these barriers on the researcher side are resource constraints on the administrative side, with many libraries citing limitations in budget and staffing for institutional repositories.  Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte sought to address these issues by strategically leveraging citation and copyright information that already existed in Web of Science to grow their institutional repository, Niner Commons. Keeping user needs and staff limitations top of mind, Atkins Library launched a project to reframe the approach to increasing participation with the repository: instead of continuing to expect users to deposit works on their own, the library developed a service in which staff could quickly and sustainably deposit works on behalf of users.