UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE POSTING TRENDS SURVEY

Michael Manoff: Research Assistant Librarian.

Digital Library Center: John C. Hodges Library.

Advisors: William Britten, Library Systems Head; Anthony Smith: Digital Library Center Coordinator.

August 24, 2004

____________________________________________________________________________________

Purpose:

To identify and categorize content that departments, centers, institutes, and individual faculty are posting and/or archiving on personal or institutional pages across the University of Tennessee Web Site. The resulting compilation is intended to inform and facilitate the process of developing an institutional repository (IR) in the following ways:

•  Provides seed content that might be used to populate an IR.

•  Indicates which faculty, departments, and centers would (by extension of already providing open access to their work) be likely to find an IR useful.

•  Indicates which disciplines are interested in increasing exposure to their work through open access technology.

•  Identifies the types of materials for which greater exposure is being sought.

•  Supports the case that an IR may fulfill a genuine, rather than an assumed need.

Scope:

The survey includes research, educational. and creative materials currently being posted on the UT Web Site. Specifically, these items include: presentations, working papers, technical reports, research abstracts, conference proceedings, manuals, handbooks, books (or book excerpts), news releases, white papers, executive summaries, annual reports, grant proposals, surveys, image collections, audio files, video files, tutorials, databases, blogs, Web Sites, software and software documentation. Also included are the personal pages and/or CVs of faculty who are providing active links to work they have already published in peer-reviewed journals. Such linking indicates a desire for greater exposure, and perhaps a willingness to seek concurrent publication in an open access venue (since many scholarly commercial publishers are now allowing their contributors to publish pre-prints and/or post-prints in IRs. For more background about this trend, refer to the following article: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access).

The survey does not include:

• Faculty pages that only link to course syllabi.
• Committee meeting minutes.
• One or two page brochures/fliers.
• Pages that primarily post links to forms.

Viewing the Results:

The results of the survey are in an index at at the following location on the Digital Library Server: http://diglib.lib.utk.edu/dlc/postingtrends/ . You will need to use an INTERNET EXPLORER browser to view these items.

Method:

The survey employed a systematic perusal of the official a-z lists of departments, and centers/institutes, on the University of Tennessee Web Site. Such content as already described was identified on these pages. The URLs of these pages were subsequently captured in folders, and arranged into an index:

• UT Departmental Content
  • Breakdown by department
    • Items in each discipline
• UT Faculty Postings
  • Breakdown by department
    • Individual faculty Web pages and/or CVs.
• Centers/Institutes
  • Items posted by the Centers and Institutes that constitute the research specializations of the university.
• Newsletters - Publications
  • Newsletters and similar publications, identified by title and/or department.
• News Releases
  • Department pages that post news events or releases.
• Journals
  • Publications associated with the university that qualify as journals.
• University Level Content
  • Content centally created by administrative or non-departmental personnel.

Given the ephemeral nature of the Web, the results in this index should be considered within the context of the time frame they were obtained (6/04- 8/04). The option to do a follow-up study in the future, to obtain a longitudinal slice of the content for comparative purposes, is left open. Further refinement of the index, by adding some basic metadata to the results, and organizing them in a database, is also an option.

Conclusions:

Analysis of the results show the following trends:

• A surprising number of UT faculty are providing access to their previously published articles by posting links to abstracts or full text on their personal Web Sites or CVs. Many of these are to journals or databases that provide for open access to their content (for example, the links on all the medical pages are to PubMed profiles of the authors). Some, however, are to self-posted, unpublished, working papers, conference proceedings, technical reports, pre-prints, presentations, and other forms of grey literature. Whatever the case, it is reasonable to assume that the authors are doing this to increase exposure to their work.
• Many departments, centers, and institutes at UT are seeking to expose their research, and publicize their activities and accomplishments, by posting research, informational, instructional, news and other academically related items on their Web pages. The departments that emerge as most active in posting output, and/or faculty research-linking, include: Agriculture, Art, Business Administration, Biology, Botany, Chemistry, Communication and Information Science, Computer Science, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Engineering, Health Sciences, Libraries, Math, Medicine, Physics and Astronomy, and Social Work. Since the hard sciences have been the leaders in open access communication, their strength relative to the social sciences and humanities should not be surprising. What is noteworthy, however, is the very strong showing of agriculture and the natural sciences.
• Newsletters are especially ubiquitous on the UT Web Site. Practically every department has one (usually displayed in PDF format). Larger departments have multiple newsletters, with many archived two to four years back. It is clear that the Web has become the preferred mode of dissemination for departmental newsletters, and from the amount of archiving going on, that administrators, and /or faculty, consider their content valuable enough to preserve.

Related Articles:

Andrew, Theo. Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff. Edinburgh University. Ariadne. Issue 37, October 2003. World Wide Web. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/andrew/. Accessed August 30, 2004.

Harnad, Stephen; Brody, Tim; Vallieres, Francois; et al. The Green and Gold Road to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. World Wide Web. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html . Accessed Aug 31, 2004.

Mackle, Morag. Filling Institutional Repositories: Practical Strategies from the DAEDALUS Project. Ariadne. Issue 39, April 2004. World Wide Web. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/mackie/. Accessed: August 30, 2004.

Web Resources:

Romeo Directory of Publishers who have given their Green Light to Self-Archiving. Web Site that indexes journal publishers' policies towards concurrent archiving of pre-prints and post-prints of articles in open access venues. http://romeo.eprints.org/

Institutional Archives Registry: Web Site that indexes 233 Institutional and Disciplinary Repositories Worldwide, with statistics and other information about their content. http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?page=all

Access to the Literature: the Debate Continues. A forum hosted by the Nature Publishing Group with an aggregation of articles about Open Access issues. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/