Finding IR collaborators on your campus

While the success of an institutional repository depends in part on engaging faculty and encouraging their participation, it can be difficult to capture the attention and imagination of this audience directly because their primary focus is on teaching and research projects. At the University of New Hampshire we reach out to faculty directly, but also have tapped into an existing network of people who already work closely with faculty and support faculty scholarship – Communications Coordinators for institutional research centers and institutes. By working closely with this group, who are charged with collecting, publishing, and promoting faculty publications, we are able to both gain access to the work they are doing and offer our support. Librarians offer publishing services through the repository, optimize indexing of faculty research by internet search services, resolve copyright issues, and advise on the use of reference management tools. Communications Coordinators promote repository services to faculty within their research groups and assist in collecting and depositing faculty publications in the repository. Our mutually beneficial relationships are based on shared goals: increasing the exposure of university scholarship and supporting faculty in their research. This poster presentation will outline the connections between librarians and Communications Coordinators at UNH and offer suggestions for uncovering and developing similar relationship at other institutions