﻿Good afternoon. I’m Gail McMillan the Director of Scholarly Communication at Virginia Tech’s
University Libraries and a founding board member of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and
Dissertations. I’m sorry I can’t be with you in Portugal, but thank you for coming
to my presentation, “The ETD Lens on the
Institutional Repository and the University.” ETDs form the foundation of many institutional
repositories (IRs) that manage and preserve community assets. Institutional Repositories
give their institutions both a digital library and a showcase,
but I wanted to know whether Institutional Repositories accurately reflect their
home institutions. Assessing Institutional Repositories from
the perspective of the institution’s scholarly output is not a common frame
of reference, so I tested whether ETDs provide a good lens through which to
assess whether the Institutional Repository is representative of
the scholarship and activities of the home institution. This study was a foray
into one aspect of how we might evaluate our universities’ digital repositories.
Content in most Institutional Repositories has not been developed like library collections have been
developed, that is with librarians who are subject specialists with budgets assigned to represent the
university’s research and teaching areas. Instead, Institutional Repositories
depend on a variety of people’s time to locate and deposit works.
Virginia Tech’s seven-year-old repository, VTechWorks has been
populated using a variety of methods. • There is self-deposit by members of the
university community—by choice or by edict. o For example, our faculty deposit directly
into the Institutional Repository through integrated systems like Symplectic Elements,
which Virginia Tech uses as an electronic faculty activity data system
to collect and manage information about research and scholarship, creative works,
teaching, extension, outreach, and service activities.
o Graduate students deposit ETDs approved by the Graduate School through a local
online system, and o Some students
also deposit as a course requirement.
• VTechWorks staff select and deposit both o Unsystematically, for example, based on
something they read about in the daily online VT News reports. And,
o Project-based: such as depositing articles funded by the library’s Open Access
Subvention Fund. • VTechWorks also receives automated harvests
from publishers such as BioMed Central, Hindawi, and MDPI who use the SWORD protocol.
VTechWorks hosted more than 71,000 works in April 2019 when I collected the data for this study.
About 96% of the content was publicly available and about 85% were textual works.
Among the wealth of articles written about Institutional Repositories,
there were very few articles about IR content development.
Assessing Institutional Repositories from the perspective of the institution’s
scholarly output as I suggest here is an as yet unused frame of reference.
Articles about assessing Institutional Repositories
tend to cover topics such as usability, preservation, marketing, findability, and
intellectual property issues, but they do not attempt to assess the relationship of
the content to the research and teaching foci
of the home institutions as an indicator of the value of the Institutional Repositories.
My study was triggered in part by these two articles and a presentation
that addressed questions about diversity within higher education institutions. At
the 2017 CNI fall membership meeting, Amanda Rust from Northeastern University Library in Boston,
Massachusetts, presented “Design for Diversity.” She
reported on a grant funded project that focused on ways in which information systems
embody and reinforce cultural norms such as data models that enforce strict gender binaries
and she addressed designing systems that take into account diverse cultural materials.
Sam Winn, a colleague and Special Collections librarian at Virginia Tech,
made several salient points in her article, “The Hubris of
Neutrality in Archives.” She wrote that • Professional practices have upheld,
and even facilitated, the institutionalized dehumanization of [among others]
trans and gender-nonconforming people… [p1] • She pointed out that …archivists contribute
to the omission or erasure of historically marginalized groups in the archives. [p2]
• And that …a “radically inclusive historical record” will not happen by accident. [p2]
Rebekah Scoggins, librarian at Leander University in Greenwood, South Carolina, published in
College and Research Libraries News her report on “Broadening Your Library’s Collection:
Implementing a LGBTQIA
Collection Development Project.” It struck me as a well-aimed study but one that was limited
because it only considered the traditional library collection,
that is purchased books, serials, and other media, but not the content of the Institutional
Repository. She determined that her library was not meeting
the needs of its users because it was out-of-date and incomplete.
Rebeka’s article in particular made me ask, “how would we know if our repository, VTechWorks,
lacked diverse cultural materials and was contributing to the
omission of historically marginalized groups?” Because of these influential works and the lack
of articles about Institutional Repository content development, I chose to conduct a study that
might help me determine if my repository was contributing to
the omission of the works of marginalized people or providing an inclusive record.
I decided to test it on a microcosm, that is a community
that encapsulates in miniature the characteristics of the whole. I analyzed
the microcosm of LGBTQ works in my repository, VTechWorks, and in Virginia Tech’s ETDs in
particular, and compared the findings to the output of the university,
including Virginia Tech’s faculty and academic units.
From several academic and community resources I compiled a vocabulary of 161 LGBTQ terms and
phrases. These resources included A Progressive’s Style Guide [from SumOfUs], the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst’s Stonewall Center, and Virginia Tech’s Safe Zone. I excluded some terms
because their meanings have changed radically over time such as gay and queer. Some terms were not
included because the Repository software, DSpace, uses the Solr search platform,
which allows “fussy” matches. That is,
Solr retrieves close matches such as sexual when the search term was sexuality. Solr
also “stems,” that is, it expands words with common endings to include plural,
past tenses, and the like. I used the common search practice of putting quotes
around phrases. (By the way, in order to reduce wordiness, when I refer to “terms,” I mean
both terms and phrases.) This list of terms may not be bias
free or comprehensive, but it served as a starting place for inquiry into the LGBTQ microcosm
at Virginia Tech.
To refine my investigation, to help understand who is doing the scholarship and research in the LGBTQ
microcosm, and to give context to the data, I searched the 161 terms in five collections:
the university at large through its website, vt.edu,
VTechWorks at large as well as within its collections of ETDs, peerreviewed
faculty publications, and academic units’ web publications. We call
these units colleges at Virginia Tech
so in this presentation I refer to the Colleges Collection. Searching the terms in VTechWorks,
produced 21,455 hits on 129 terms in 71,734 works. I searched the terms in the collection of >32,000
ETDs; 115 terms got about 9,000 hits. The faculty research collection got 858 hits on 40 terms
in nearly 4,000 peer-reviewed articles, and the Colleges Collection got 400 hits on almost 90
terms in about 14,000 works.
Searching VT at large, 109 of the terms got nearly 85,000 hits. I did not search from
the university’s homepage
because indexing of Virginia Tech’s websites includes VTechWorks. Instead, I searched the
terms in the Google.com search box which allowed me to exclude the VTechWorks site when searching
vt.edu [At https://www.google.com/ I used this search strategy: [term] site:vt.edu -
site:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu -site:theses.lib.vt.edu].
Because these five collections have radically different
sizes and ages, I converted the number of hits for each term in each collection into a percentage
of hits within its collection. Then I compared the percentage of hits within and across collections
which provided the lens of the graduate students through
their ETDs, the faculty’s use of the terms in their peer-reviewed publications,
and the academic units’ and
university-wide use in works often aimed at the general public and alumni.
Creating spreadsheets for the search results from each collection allowed me to
sort the data in various ways.
This table shows highest percentage of hits sorted by hits in the ETD collection. As you can see, the
term “gender” got nearly 50% of the hits in the ETD, faculty research,
and colleges collections. In the ETD collection that left the remaining 114 terms
with hits between (three point five percent) 3.5% and 0.01%.
I initially thought it would be interesting to compare faculty
and graduate students’ non-use of the terms also. But, you may recall that of
the 161 terms I searched, 115 appeared in ETDs but only 40 appeared in the
Faculty Research Collection. There were 75 unused terms, which was too many to
be meaningful for this study.
This chart shows that graduate students used some terms much more frequently than did faculty. But,
faculty only used two terms more than Graduate Students, gender bias and gender expression.
This is when I wish I was a linguist or had collaborated with one in order
to determine if there is some correlation among the terms used
more frequently by one type of author, that is graduate students vs. faculty.
This is my last table and it shows search results for the top 20 hits
in the university-wide collection. There were 4 notable disparities in
the terms used more frequently at vt.edu than in the ETD Collection:
sexual orientation (13.8% vs 2.9%), gender identity (7.8% vs 2.0%),
and gender expression (7.0% vs 0.2%). These terms appear more in public-facing
web documents than in graduate student’s academic research.
Only one term appeared with considerably more frequency in ETDs:
gender (49% vs 39%), that is “gender” was used more in graduate students’ research
than in the academic units’ public facing university web sites.
After analyzing terms that appeared in ETDs but not in VT at large and
vice versa, the disparities were too small to be noteworthy for this study.
The goal of this study was to investigate whether the institutional repository
represents the scholarship and activities of its home institution,
and whether this can be determined by studying a microcosm of the
Repository, and particularly its ETD Collection, and comparing it with the same microcosm in the
university. I
used a controlled vocabulary to analyze the LGBTQ microcosm in the university website,
vt.edu,
and VTechWorks, particularly its ETD collection. Using a microcosm to look at graduate students’
ETDs and the university website provided the opportunity to
reflect on the contribution of ETDs to the development of institutional repositories
through a manageable data set. The percentage of search hits on
the selected terms at the university’s website was the measure of the LGBTQ domain and contextualized
the data from ETDs as well as the whole Repository.
Since 94% of the LGBTQ terms appearing in the university website
through a Google search of vt.edu also appeared in the VTechWorks, and 94%
of the terms had a <2% difference in the percentage of hits, I
say that the institutional repository as a whole reflects quite well the scholarship and activities
at the university.
Of the 109 terms that ETDs in VTechWorks and VT have in common, 99 vary in their occurrence by
less than one percent. That is, 91% of the terms have the nearly equal percentage of hits
in each collection. Is this also a high
enough correlation to say that the ETD lens quite accurately reflects the scholarship and
activities at the university, at least in the LGBTQ domain? I think so.
It will be necessary, of course, to study additional microcosms in
order to better understand whether this is a high enough correlation
to determine if the Institutional Repository and more particularly its ETDs
are truly representative of the scholarship and activities at the university.
I have started to compile a vocabulary to study the
microcosm of Indigenous Peoples and to refine my search strategy to always use
Google search instead of the Solr search built into the DSpace repository platform.
I would be very grateful if conference participants would send me their
comments on the study methodology and the criteria
I used to assess whether the Institutional Repository accurately reflects the
scholarship and activities of its home institution.
If anyone is interested in conducting similar studies and
comparing across institutions, please let me know. My email address is gailmac@vt.edu. Thank you!