In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities around the world were forced to close or move to online instruction. Many institutions host yearly student research symposiums. This article describes how two universities used their institutional repositories to adapt their student research symposiums to virtual events in a matter of weeks. Both universities use the bepress Digital Commons platform for their institutional repositories. Even though the two universities’ symposium strategies differed, some commonalities emerged, particularly with regard to learning the best practices to highlight student work and support their universities’ efforts to host research symposiums virtually.
INTRODUCTION: When U.S. News & World Report announced that it would rank law schools’ scholarly impact, U.S. News asked law schools to work with HeinOnline, a legal database, to ensure the accuracy of the database-created faculty author profiles because they would be using Hein’s database to gather citation metrics to measure scholarly impact. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM: This practice article describes a project at UNC Chapel Hill in the law library to ensure that their faculty publications were included in HeinOnline’s database and that HeinOnline Author Profiles were accurate. This case study helps librarians tackling either similar law library projects or similar projects throughout academia as metrics gathering for scholarly impact in a variety of manners, including educational rankings, becomes more prevalent. NEXT STEPS: Following this project, Hein contacted UNC to inform the law library they had identified an additional 119 articles for faculty members not previously attached to UNC faculty Hein Author Profiles. Some implications from this project are unclear and changing methodology, scalability issues, authority control concerns, lack of capturing interdisciplinary works, and an increased workload for librarians. Librarians, especially Scholarly Communications Librarians, are well equipped to promote our faculty’s scholarship by understanding the methodology of these educational ranking systems and by connecting our faculty and their research to the database tools of our field. This article represents just one field, but the implications apply more broadly.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe a state mandated merger of two institutional repositories from two separate campuses of a university into one new institutional repository. Due to a State Legislature mandate, the University of South Florida was required to merge institutional repositories from two campus into one new institutional repository.
Design/methodology/approach
USF Libraries formed a committee, planned for the migration and executed of the migration.
Findings
The authors discovered many unforeseen issues during the process of the migration such as difficulties with site redirects and hidden collections.
Originality/value
This project was a large-scale migration of institutional repositories, under a tight deadline due to a legislative mandate, that has not been discussed in detail in the literature.
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