'Weather cloudy & cool harvest begun’: St Andrews output usage beyond the repository

Abstract

St Andrews might be small but, as a research intensive University with around 700 research active staff and over 8500 students, its research output is considerable. The St Andrews Research Repository has been accepting deposits since 2006 and since 2007 the University has required electronic thesis submission. Use has grown and the repository currently comprises electronic theses, research articles, conference proceedings, working papers, book chapters, research monographs and other items. The Library Open Access and Cataloguing teams have marked several deposit milestones in the Repository - 5000 (February 2015), 8000 (July 2016) and 9000 (February 2017) - so content has risen sharply. Deposits of research publications are driven from a connected CRIS, primarily due to funderimposed Open Access mandates, with continued direct deposit of new theses and an ongoing programme of thesis digitisation adding to the increase. Our mature infrastructure and supporting processes mean the University has excellent funder compliance rates – RCUK (93%), Hefce (92%). But it's not all about compliance. We are keen to understand and share how institutional research outputs can have wide reach and visibility, and how the repository can be used to promote user engagement and public outreach with other content. We use reports from the British Library EThOS service and IRUS-UK (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics UK) for signs and hints of how downloaded items might be used and suggest how usage statistics might be publicly presented. In this brief 10 x 10 presentation we're excited to show several items from the St Andrews Research Repository and what we discovered about their life in St Andrews and beyond.