| SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 |
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New Horizons Panel: Accessing and preserving the scholarly output of an institution benefits all involved. However, faculty members are often slow to submit materials and develop repository collections. Denning (2001) identifies storytelling as a way transmit new concepts within an organization, enhancing or changing an individual?s perceptions of change by supplementing abstract analysis. The use of a ?springboard story? is provided to listeners as a visualization tool. The story provides a framework for individuals to contextualize change. In developing an institutional repository, the library is moving from a passive storehouse of scholarly communication, to a proactive publisher. The Internet is changing the role of the library and the way its users access information. By asking ?what does our library do?? librarians may develop a story that articulates the change internally: it can be used to create support for an institutional repository and develop goals. Stories can both encourage acceptance and promote understanding within an organization. The stories can be beneficial to librarians, who get feedback about the process and how individual faculty members are using the IR. Using data collected during case study interviews with the developers of six institutional repositories and three discipline repositories in the United States and Canada, the presentation identifies the stories that can be associated with IR development and the conversational triggers for librarians to use while marketing a repository. |