Institutional Repository Promotion: Current Practices and Opinions in Texas Academia

Abstract

Abstract Promoting an institutional repository (IR) to both faculty and end-users can be challenging. We surveyed academic libraries with an IR in Texas, and asked both library administrators and IR managers about their efforts to promote and grow their IR in both size and downloads. In addition, we studied the websites of Association of Research Libraries and Texas academic libraries to see how other institutions place links to their IRs on the websites and name them in different ways to draw attention. We probed and discuss findings regarding active marketing to faculty in order to grow the IR size, and passive promotion efforts such as linking on the library website, custom branding to help people find and remember the IR, and so on. We found that most marketing was geared toward faculty, and a minimal amount of active marketing efforts were made to the end-users.