Come Together: Interdepartmental Collaboration to Connect the IR and Library Catalog: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

Abstract:  While institutional repositories (IRs) often include a built-in search tool and/or are indexed by web search engines, some patrons go directly to the online library catalog with their information need. Rather than hope that users will stumble on the IR from the library website or assume that they will start their research with a Google search, librarians can enhance IR discoverability and usage by integrating its content into the library catalog. With strong teamwork, good communication, and a shared vision, this endeavor transforms the IR and library catalog from separate, siloed platforms into a more cohesive collections package. At the University of San Diego, librarians and administrators across three departments came together to share information and work in concert to explore the benefits of auto-harvesting IR content into the library catalog. Driven by a vision of enhancing discoverability and access, as well as promoting the IR and enriching the catalog, the team members worked cooperatively to identify specific IR collections appropriate for harvest, investigate technical logistics, consult outside vendors (including Innovative Interfaces, Inc./III and bepress), and experiment with implementation.


Text and data mining offers an opportunity to improve the way we access and analyse the outputs of academic research. But the technical infrastructure of the current scholarly communication system is not yet ready to support TDM to its full potential, even for open access outputs. To address this problem, Petr KnothNancy Pontika and Lucas Anastasiou have developed the CORE Publisher Connector, a toolkit service designed to assist text miners in accessing content though a single machine interface. The Connector aims to solve the heterogeneity among publisher APIs and assist text miners with data collection, provide a centralised point of access to all openly available scientific publications, and provide a high-performance, constantly updated access interface.

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Autoload: a pipeline for expanding the holdings of an Institutional Repository enabled by ResourceSync

Abstract:  Providing local access to locally produced content is a primary goal of the Institutional Repository (IR). Guidelines, requirements, and workflows are among the ways in which institutions attempt to ensure this content is deposited and preserved, but some content is always missed. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, the library implemented a service called LANL Research Online (LARO), to provide public access to a collection of publicly shareable LANL researcher publications authored between 2006 and 2016. LARO exposed the fact that we have full text for only about 10% of eligible publications for this time period, despite a review and release requirement that ought to have resulted in a much higher deposition rate. This discovery motivated a new effort to discover and add more full text content to LARO. Autoload attempts to locate and harvest items that were not deposited locally, but for which archivable copies exist. Here we describe the Autoload pipeline prototype and how it aggregates and utilizes Web services including Crossref, SHERPA/RoMEO, and oaDOI as it attempts to retrieve archivable copies of resources. Autoload employs a bootstrapping mechanism based on the ResourceSync standard, a NISO standard for resource replication and synchronization. We implemented support for ResourceSync atop the LARO Solr index, which exposes metadata contained in the local IR. This allowed us to utilize ResourceSync without modifying our IR. We close with a brief discussion of other uses we envision for our ResourceSync-Solr implementation, and describe how a new effort called Signposting can replace cumbersome screen scraping with a robust autodiscovery path to content which leverages Web protocols.