Michelle Armstrong, Assistant Professor and Scholarly Communications Librarian, is one of bepress’s 2013 IR All-Stars for her innovative techniques in introducing the repository to faculty. Michelle has been responsible for Boise State’s ScholarWorks since 2008. In that time, she, with the help of Library Assistants Janice Burkholder, Lizzie Walker (now at Wichita State University), and Kimberly Holling, has turned it into a rare thing: an IR that faculty know and seek out.
From the outset, Michelle and her team made it a priority to engage faculty with the IR. To do so, she identified a high-profile project on campus: the University Author Recognition Bibliography. By bringing this well-known publication into ScholarWorks and using automated features built into the platform to compile it instantly each year, Michelle and her team capitalize on their expertise and existing workflows to save months of work that used to be spent compiling, organizing, and formatting a brand new bibliography of hundreds of citations each year.
More than just saving time, though, Michelle uses the bibliography as an opportunity to reach faculty in new ways. She and her team have created a special SelectedWorks gallery for the bibliography, highlighting the individual faculty members and providing a reason to draw faculty attention to their photos and web presence. Janice Burkholder works to secure rights to post the full text of as many faculty publications as possible, which means that faculty now receive monthly download reports reminding them again of the library’s service. And finally, each year Michelle and her team reach out to faculty using SelectedWorks to assist them with any changes to their page, including adding missing publication and citation information for that year – a subtle but smart opportunity to get them to add more papers.
Hosting the bibliography directly in ScholarWorks has resulted in an attractive, well-organized, easy-to-maintain display of the accomplishments of Boise State faculty. It additionally increases faculty awareness of repository services, and provides free online access to many of the actual articles, something they could not previously do. Tapping into such a public, university-wide project has also been great for the repository, raising its profile on campus and bringing in new content.
Michelle is a well-regarded presenter and scholarly author, participating in a bepress Community Webinar, an ALA session on strategies to develop the IR, and many other IR presentations at regional and national conferences. To learn more about her work with ScholarWorks and with faculty, see her SelectedWorks page here: http://works.bepress.com/michelle_armstrong/.
To learn more about bepress’s 2013 IR All-Stars, see our announcement here.
