Georgia Southern University has found great success using the professional peer-review tools in their IR to manage 17 conferences proceedings and symposia over a span of just three years, including the latest World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. They came to this success through a simple route: offering to partner with another office on campus. For example, the Continuing Education Office needed to find more effective ways to host conferences. The staff in charge of the repository, Digital Commons @ Georgia Southern, saw the opportunity to provide the full cycle of conference proceedings management as a library service.
Stacy Kluge, Instructional Services Coordinator for the Centers for Teaching and Technology at Georgia Southern, explains why they took the conference services and ran with them: “Digital Commons permits us to solicit, receive, review, and publish our conference proposals and journal articles as one seamless process.” Previously, they had been doing peer-review manually through a homegrown web application created by a student intern and analytics was measured through third-party software.
Ashley Lowery, Digital Collections Specialist, and Debra Skinner, Coordinator of Cataloging & Metadata / Assistant Dept. Head of Collection & Resource Services, spearheaded this partnership by offering IR services to facilitate all the conferences that Georgia Southern wanted to host. And, when they hosted conferences using the IR a remarkable thing began to happen: faculty wanted to publish a related journal when they saw the possibilities of the peer-review system used in hosting conferences.
Check out the five conferences which have inspired related journals:
For more information on managing conference proceedings at your institution, contact your bepress consultant today at support@dc.bepress.com!
