Harvesting the Academic Landscape: Streamlining the Ingestion of Professional Scholarship Metadata into the Institutional Repository

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Although librarians initially hoped institutional repositories (IRs) would grow through researcher self-archiving, practice shows that growth is much more likely through library-directed deposit. Libraries must then find efficient ways to ingest material into their IR to ensure growth and relevance. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM Valparaiso University developed and implemented a workflow that was semiautomated to help cut down on the time needed to ingest articles into its IR, ValpoScholar. The workflow, which continues to be refined, makes use of practices and ideas used by other repositories to more efficiently collect metadata for items and upload them to the repository. NEXT STEPS The article discusses the pros and cons of this workflow and areas of ingesting that still need to be addressed, including adding full-text items, checking copyright policies, managing student staffing, and dealing with hurdles created by the repository’s software.