Browsing by Subject "Scholarly Electronic Publishing"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Finding the Golden Mean: An Efficient Model for Improving Discovery and Access for Legacy Theses and Dissertations in a Medical Library’s Institutional Repository
    (2023-11-16) Pieczko, Brandon T.
    Developing an efficient and cost-effective method for providing access to legacy print theses and dissertations is a challenge faced by many libraries that serve medical schools and other academic health science programs. The significant staff time and financial cost associated with systematically digitizing and providing complete online access to print theses and dissertations can be problematic given the potentially limited return on that investment as reflected in patron use statistics and other metrics. This presentation will describe how a medical school library improved the discoverability and accessibility of its legacy print theses and dissertations by implementing a cost-effective, selective digitization workflow that leveraged existing metadata and limited staff time. This workflow involved extracting and transforming existing metadata from the library catalog, selectively digitizing excerpts (title page, abstract, table of contents, and committee information) of all the theses and dissertations, and utilizing batch upload capabilities to add new descriptive records to the library’s institutional repository. In addition to improving the discoverability of these important scholarly resources, the medical library intends to implement a “scan-on-demand” service model in which patrons who are interested in obtaining the full text of a thesis or dissertation can do so by contacting the library directly. To date, the library has added descriptive records for more than 500 theses/dissertations to its institutional repository and has seen a tremendous return on its modest investment in the form of thousands of new page views and downloads within a few months.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Going Beyond the IR: Using Content-Specific Platforms and Targeted Outreach to Provide Integrated Access to a Medical School’s Education Scholarship
    (2021-11-17) Pieczko, Brandon T.; Craven, Hannah J.
    To increase local contributions to medical education scholarship, a medical school began hosting an annual school-wide conference in 2020. Two librarians worked proactively with conference organizers to preserve and provide access to presentation materials and session recordings. This targeted outreach became more effective in the second year as students and faculty were invited on the conference submission form to express interest in contributing materials to the university’s institutional repository. The librarians were able to use this list of interested participants to obtain permissions, additional information, and address potential questions rather than relying on a post-hoc solicitation of conference materials. Workflow tutorials and tracking spreadsheets were developed and used by library staff to upload items and metadata to the campus institutional repository (posters, presentation slides) and a university-wide repository for digital audio and video collections (video recordings). The 2021 conference being virtual meant all presentations were recorded and increased ease of retrieval for upload. Librarians were able to integrate and streamline access to the materials across different systems using unique persistent identifiers. This new approach to documenting local scholarship provides sustainable, online access to conference materials that would otherwise not be available long-term, promotes the research of students and faculty, and increases the visibility of the institution’s digital repositories as a research service. Additionally, leveraging content-specific platforms to provide access to both traditional research products and recordings of the presentations themselves gives asynchronous viewers a more complete, integrated learning experience. Pressure points, limitations, and areas of improvement will be discussed. Presentation recording available online: https://hsrc.himmelfarb.gwu.edu/mirl/2021/program/9