INSPIRE: Using Personal Repositories to Increase Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories

The INSPIRE project, a collaboration between Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the University of Virginia Library, has the goal of increasing the usage of institutional repositories by teaming them with an individual’s personal repository. We regard a personal repository as an arbitrary collection organized according to individual idiosyncrasy. Our current focus is on that part of a personal repository associated with one’s academic pursuits. We have chosen the structure of a curriculum vitae (CV) and developed the OmniMea prototype (http://www.omnimea.org) to provide a convenient and intuitive user interface into this subcollection of a personal repository.

While data management for large-scale science and engineering projects is not a solved problem, a number of efforts are focused on this aspect of data acquisition and curation. In contrast, one goal of INSPIRE is to study data acquisition and curation strategies in support of single-PI or small-group research projects at academic institutions. Long-term data management in these smaller research projects is challenging due to the limited funding and personnel time typically allocated to data management.

Our proposed poster and demonstration will show how we use a personal repository, and more specifically a CV as GUI, to federate researchers’ materials, both literature and data, from multiple institutional repositories and publisher repositories into a convenient and useful form. Researchers may use their personal repository to store, reference, display, filter, and share their publications, data, and other research output with others. In addition to federating materials already held in existing repositories, a personal repository can also be used to capture intellectual outputs of faculty and students for submission into an institutional repository when that is appropriate. We believe that the convenience of a personal repository, combined with value-added services that INSPIRE will provide, will motivate faculty and student participation, with the end result that data acquisition, curation and sharing of data, plus utilization of institutional repositories are increased.