----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Leslie Carr <lac@ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Sent: Thursday, 30 October, 2008 15:04:21
Subject: Looking for Evidence of Researcher Engagement with Repositories
Practitioners, developers and researchers in the repository community have been asking whether repositories are effective at
appealing to their primary stakeholders: researchers. It would be great to have a collection of success stories - anecdotes of how repositories have been able to improve the lot of researchers - for appealing to institutional repository nay-sayers and open access agnostics. These should be examples of real wins for real individuals rather than marketing claims from repository software suppliers(!) as many repository successes are due to the library team's hard work and insight rather than the technical wizardry of the repository platform.
Please can you email me a short (1 paragraph) success story (or stories!) about how your repository improved the experience of some researchers at your institution. They could be in the form of a user testimonial or described in your own words. I am not looking for tales of mass conversions and hysteria, just very practical stories of repository benefit as experienced by
individuals. I will collect these together and make them available for repository managers and others to use in their marketing and advocacy.
A cross-platform discussion on this topic of Researcher Engagement will be held at the previously announced EPrints meeting just before SPARC DR on November 16th in Baltimore. If you're planning to go to Baltimore, come and join in and boast about your repository's success, whatever software you use!
---