Abstract
The University of Kansas has hosted the Kansas Working Papers in Linguistic (KWPL) in its digital repository, KU ScholarWorks, since 2007, but complete subject metadata, based on Library of Congress Subject Headings, was added only in 2013. The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of adding Library of Congress subject headings in enhancing discoverability and increasing downloads. Results have provided compelling evidence that the additional metadata has led to an overall increase of downloads from KWPL by 66% in the year following the addition of the enhanced metadata.
Highlights
Background on KWPLKansas Working Papers in Linguistics is an annual publication of the University of Kansas Linguistics Graduate Student Association
While I had access to statistics for the collection going back to 2007, I chose to begin my sample with August 2012 for two primary reasons: 1) That was the date that our DSpace repository KU ScholarWorks became indexed and accessible through our library's federated search tool, which appears to have immediately contributed to a larger number of views and downloads of KWPL papers; and 2) only 4 out of the 351 total papers were added to KWPL after the Primo implementation, a small number that was not likely to significantly alter the statistical results without being separately accounted for
For the year from August 1, 2012 to July 31, 2013, the average monthly downloads of papers from KWPL was 1681. This was somewhat higher than the average of 1163 monthly downloads in the five years before Primo, and this 44% increase is presumably due to the Primo indexing of KU ScholarWorks
Summary
Background on KWPLKansas Working Papers in Linguistics (hereafter KWPL) is an annual publication of the University of Kansas Linguistics Graduate Student Association. Prior to 2005, KWPL had been published by the KU Linguistics Department in print format only, and was shared with a limited audience beyond KU, primarily with other universities with prominent Linguistics Departments, in exchange for their own working papers. Often these publications languished on meeting room bookshelves of the various linguistics departments, as they were not routinely indexed in the major citation indexes for the field such as Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts or the MLA Bibliography. Several universities had announced that they would be suspending publication, as the printing and distribution costs had become too expensive
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