Strategies for acquiring content : experiences at HKUST

At HKUST, our goal was to build a critical mass of scholarly publications in a short period of time. Size and speed were our concern. Copyright and self-archiving issues needed to be addressed. In this discussion, we will share the strategies we used, problems we encountered, issues involved and some pleasant surprises. In order to build the momentum, we decided to capture pre-existing collections of scholarly content and simultaneously harvest suitable publications directly from the sources. The grey literature of working papers and technical reports was our first target. There were over 600 papers of this kind scattered in departmental offices and in the cyberspace. We simply contacted departments and offered to collect and preserve them in digital format and to organize them in logical and easily retrievable fashion. Consequently, a total of 557 papers were deposited. Many faculty members have a practice of posting the full-text of their papers on their websites. We emailed 89 faculty and obtained permissions to post 144 papers in our Repository. We also wrote to 40 publishers and obtained permissions for another 119 papers. We encouraged faculty to submit their papers directly, but the response was disappointing. In order to raise faculty’s awareness of open access, we featured articles in our newsletters and held an anniversary celebration to honor our top contributors after the Repository topped 1,000 documents. Over the years, 50 conferences have been held on campus. For those proceedings published in-house with copyright owned by the university, we singled out papers authored by UST members and sought permissions on 107 papers. We also wrote to professional societies and publishers. Thirty-five conference papers were added as a result. Electronic dissertations and theses was a handy collection that was already accessible. We loaded the metadata of 110 open access theses from our Electronic Theses Database and obtained permissions from over 100 alumni on thei