Project plan 5: Team and end-user engagement

Engagement with the Researcher Community: Effecting Culture Change

The aim of DepositMO is to effect culture change among researchers to use repositories in their everyday workflows. The key to the success of the DepositMO project will be the negotiation of a new relationship between researchers and the repository, including using the developed technology solutions. This project will seek to form deep engagements with researchers from a number of disciplines, a number of existing repository projects and a number of institutions.

The DepositMO user community will initially be drawn from researchers from across the Universities of Southampton and Edinburgh, with focus on disciplines which have investments in current JISC repository activities and multi‐institutional research user communities – in the areas of archaeology, chemistry, materials science – and that are principal users of Microsoft Office. We are working with these user communities already as part of the JISC Institutional Data Management Blueprint (IDMB) project.

Teaching activities, across the disciplines, will be represented by the team responsible for the Southampton EdShare repository,  and the Humbox project.

Edinburgh University will represent a different repository infrastructure (DSpace).

The principal stakeholders are researchers and lecturers, and this project will aim at trainee and early‐career researchers, such as postgraduate students, postdoctoral research assistants and junior lecturers, who by definition have more time for engagement and who offer a greater chance of developing new practice. Our secondary stakeholders are librarians and repository staff (repository liaison officers and repository managers) who mediate, manage and offer leadership on repository engagement.

The major mechanism of researcher engagement undertaken by this project will be deskside coaching, i.e. face to face, one‐on‐one training and consultation. This is the recently established mechanism of the University of Southampton’s Library Repository Team and has also been adopted by the University of Edinburgh’s Research Publications Service.

Engagement methodology

i. Develop training resources (presentations, videos, web resources) in conjunction with the initial set of focus communities (Archaelogy, Chemistry, Materials Science, EdShare)

a. The resources will comprise a Deskside Coaching Kit (DSC) for use in one‐to‐one training and a Virtual DSC (VDSC) as a supplementary support resource that can be used by trainees and end users after their deskside sessions, that can be shared with colleagues, and that will be used in Graduate School research training modules.
b. The resources will focus on the extended repository capabilities developed by this project, and on those capabilities developed by other projects in the Deposit programme.

ii. Train the trainers (Southampton and Edinburgh library liaison officers)
iii. Run an in‐depth program of deskside training to whole University staff
iv. Monitor the effects of the training program, both qualitatively in terms of change of attitudes and behaviour and quantitatively in terms of the use of the repository
v. Roll out the program to the disciplinary research and teaching users.
vi. The developer community will be targeted through JISC mechanisms (e.g. dev8D), Microsoft Research, EPrints, and the researcher communities. We will take leadership of the OfficeSWORD open source project.

Close working relationships should exist between the 3 layers of the team (shown in the figure) with quarterly (or more) meetings involving all partners. The core investigators and project manager will interface discussion between developers and training/user team.