Institutional Repositories and Faculty Participation: Encouraging Deposits by Advancing Personal Goals

Abstract

The Future Voices in Public Services column is a forum for students in graduate library and information science programs to discuss key issues they see in academic library public services, to envision what they feel librarians in public service have to offer to academia, to tell us of their visions for the profession, or to tell us of research that is going on in library schools. We hope to provide fresh perspectives from those entering our field, in both the United States and other countries. Interested faculty of graduate library and information science programs, who would like their students' ideas represented in these pages, are invited to contact Nancy H. Dewald at nxd7@psu.edu. Brigitte Burris is a graduate student at Drexel University's iSchool and also works as a librarian at the University of Pennsylvania. At a time when many librarians hope for the expansion of open access to scholarly resources, Burris here proposes a method of adding attributes to articles in institutional repositories in order to increase faculty members' incentive for depositing their scholarly articles. ***** The iSchool at Drexel's Master of Science in Library and Information Science, MS(LIS), is the second oldest program of its kind in the nation, and one of just 56 ALA-accredited programs. More technologically oriented than other programs, the MS(LIS) prepares graduates for a wide variety of positions including academic librarian, knowledge management specialist, systems librarian, digital librarian, Web developer, and competitive intelligence analyst. The 2009 edition of U.S. News & World Report's “America's Best Graduate Schools” rated the MS(LIS) program 11th in the nation overall, with specialties in information systems and digital librarianship ranking fifth and sixth, respectively. The iSchool at Drexel's faculty has been nationally recognized, ranked by Academic Analytics, a third party company benchmarking academic excellence, as 8th in the nation for scholarly productivity.