Content liberation! How increasing the institutional repository content turned into faculty outreach services

Abstract

In January 2016, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty adopted the Open Access Policy, which encouraged faculty to deposit their articles into the Carolina Digital Repository. The UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries Open Access Implementation team was then charged with increasing the amount of content in the Carolina Digital Repository and raising faculty awareness of the Open Access Policy and author rights issues. In this paper, we will discuss the challenges of locating and harvesting content, the outreach strategies we used with faculty from diverse departments, and the assessment of the overall project’s success. We also share findings from our analysis of the content we collected and recommendations for replicating or scaling up similar projects.