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University of Southern Queensland

 

The University of Southern Queensland is a small (by Australian standards) regional university, with a small library team and not much money. They are collaborating with other regional universities to seek funding for the RUBRIC project. This project will build on the initial work USQ has carried out to establish a local institutional repository of student research projects and a small number of academic research outputs, using the GNU ePrints software.

The genesis of the ePrints project was when the engineering faculty decided to submit their 4^th year engineering projects to the university library in digital format. The library saw this as an opportunity to set up a research repository. It currently contains about 100 student papers. A small number of researchers also contribute their outputs.

Their experience is that ePrints has a low cost of entry — it took a part-time person about 3 months to configure the software and customise the front end to their needs. They chose it over DSpace because at the time:

• more people were using ePrints
• it seemed to be easier to work with

At the moment, a cataloguer assigns metadata to each item. They don’t have author self-submission yet, but plan to do so. They see the faculty librarians providing local support. They use the ASRC to classify individual items.

Close working relationships with academic staff mean that authors are coming to them wanting to submit their content. These staff also actively promote the repository among their colleagues.

They want to give usage information back to researchers, as is done at Queensland University of Technology:

• top 50 authors
• top 50 papers downloaded
• papers downloaded by author

Not having the budget or staff to implement a research management system, they are investigating the option of using the repository to satisfy their DEST reporting requirements; ePrints already supports most of the data items needed. The systems librarian, who takes care of ePrints, can do this.

The biggest challenge is finding skilled people to get the system up and running. They adopted a softly, softly approach — breaking the work into small, achievable phases with a tight focus that meet a clearly-defined need. Taking small steps they know they can deliver makes it easier to manage and builds trust among their users.

The RUBRIC proposal seeks funding to:

• deploy best repository practice at USQ to clarify implementation issues and build capability
• provide a vehicle for an assisted take-up service with identified partner institutions
• roll-out repository services to smaller and regional higher education organisations

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