University Libraries Hosts Institutional Repository Day on April 17
Wed, 03/18/2015 - 10:57am | By: Dawn Smith
University Libraries at The University of Southern Mississippi will host Institutional Repository (IR) Day on April 17 in Cook Library Room 123. IR Day will feature presentations, discussions and workshops on the value and importance of institutional repositories for promoting the scholarship and research of their university.
“Institutional repositories are a powerful tool that allow a university to take the research and scholarship produced at the institution and present it before a global audience,” said Josh Cromwell, University Libraries' Scholarly Institutional Repository Coordinator. “Works that were once confined to a bookshelf or disk can now be accessed around the world, and IRs have played a tremendous role in making this possible.
“IR Day is a great opportunity for us to teach others about the value of IRs to their campuses by highlighting several of the success stories we've experienced with our own repository, Aquila. “We are also incredibly excited to welcome Marilyn Billings, one of the nation's preeminent librarians in the field of scholarly communication, to Southern Miss to share some of her expertise and experiences with IRs as well.”
Billings, Scholarly Communication and Special Initiatives Librarian from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will serve as the event's keynote speaker. As head of the Office of Scholarly Communication, she provides campus and regional leadership and education in alternative scholarly communication strategies and gives presentations on author rights, new digital publishing models and the role of digital repositories in today's research and scholarship endeavors as well as providing oversight to the UMass Amherst digital repository, ScholarWorks.
Her most recent activity has focused on her work as a campus leader and national speaker on the topic of alternatives to high cost textbooks, the use of open educational resources, and coordinator of the Open Education Initiative launched at UMass Amherst in spring 2011.
IR Day's schedule of events will include the keynote address, and a panel discussion led by faculty from the University's academic colleges. Following lunch, provided by University Libraries, participants will be offered three workshops.
The first, led by Cromwell will discuss managing journals and theses/dissertations. The second will be led by Jeanne Pavy, Scholarly Communications Officer at the University of New Orleans, and will talk through the lessons learned from managing an institutional repository. The final workshop will be led by Billings and will go beyond the institutional repository by giving an introduction to the Open Education Initiative, a nationally recognized effort coordinated by Billings to promote the use of open textbooks and educations resources.
Aquila, Southern Miss' Institutional Repository, is an open access digital repository containing scholarly works created by the University's faculty, staff and students. Aquila also hosts digital journals and newsletters published by the University, as well as information and resources from events hosted by the University.
The majority of submissions to Aquila have open access availability and are indexed, making them highly discoverable through internet search engines, such as Google, thereby extending the University's scholarly output to a wider audience.
For more information on IR Day, contact Josh Cromwell at 601.266.6200 or Joshua.CromwellFREEMississippi.