Managing the challenges : acquiring content for the HKUST Institutional Repository

Many early adopters of institutional repositories agreed that acquiring content is often more of a challenge than harnessing the technology. The second part of the presentation addresses the issue of how we mobilized HKUST Library’s limited resources to obtain scholarly content. In the planning stage, we formed a task force to implement the system and address issues relating to collection, access, submission policies, and faculty concerns. We developed policies and procedures, establish metadata standards, and set up authority control expeditiously. Library staff then interpreted publishers’ policies and proceeded with those publications from publishers with the most liberal policies. We also launched various public relations activities to market the idea to faculty and administration. We formed virtual work teams. Subject librarians liaised with faculty, harvested the publications, ascertained publishers’ policies and indexed the documents. Data entry staff then converted the documents to PDF format and proxy archived them. We adopted a proactive approach to acquire both scholarly and special types of materials. First, we approached faculty to get permission to archive their published papers already posted on the web. Then we contacted departments for working papers and research centers for their publications. Next we acquired conference papers that had clear copyright permission. Simultaneously, we also uploaded open-access electronic theses and deposited scholarly publications from our University Archives. We also harvested documents from open access publications. Throughout the process, we encountered different issues and problems but also discovered new leads to other collections and ideas. With a repository of 1,600 papers, the next challenge is to maintain the collection’s speed of growth while continuing our work with all stakeholders