A lot of behind-the-scenes work goes into keeping the Blough-Weis Library running smoothly. One service that not many students know about is our institutional repository, which librarians Ryan Ake and Brianne Dort recently presented at the ExLibris Northeast User Group Conference.
For those unfamiliar, Endeavor is Susquehanna’s institutional repository that hosts, preserves, and showcases the scholarly and creative works produced by both students and faculty. Users can search for works by each school or by previous special events, like past Senior Scholars Days. This is especially important to SU because without it, we would not be able to easily distribute all the research and scholarly materials that are produced by our community.
Endeavor is provided to us by the vendor ExLibris and is powered by their research management system titled Esploro, which uses smart harvest technology to scour the internet for information pertaining to an institution’s scholarly endeavors. Ryan and Brianne’s entire presentation centered around Susquehanna’s adoption of Esploro and how it can benefit small liberal arts colleges like ours.
In 2017, Susquehanna University acquired its first repository system, Digital Commons. However, as time progressed, the library staff began noticing some issues with the program. The biggest obstacle was how time consuming it was to keep the repository up to date. The Blough-Weis Library is staffed by a small group of eight people, and there was not a position dedicated to repository management. The employees had to add it to their already busy schedules. Additionally, it was difficult for the librarians to track down information because there was not a system in place for faculty to share their work with them. Overall, this caused the Digital Commons repository to have lower community engagement, so the cost of it did not seem worth the investment.
In late 2021, the Blough-Weis Library decided to switch from Digital Commons to Esploro, and the migration eventually began in spring 2022. The library imported about 251 items from Digital Commons to Esploro and has brought in 4,654 items from the programs first smart harvest. With each smart harvest, Esploro sends our librarians a list of digital materials for them to check for relevancy. From the first smart harvest, 27% of the materials provided were deemed relevant. Aside from smart harvests, items can be added manually by title or DOI. Currently, 85% of SU’s faculty included in Esploro have had their own smart harvest.
Going forward, both Brianne and Ryan hope to expand the system and its usage within the university, since only 48% of SU faculty currently have assets in Esploro. Additionally, they hope to continue including student scholarship projects, like those from Senior Scholars Days.
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