Ann Connolly
Director of Product
bepress
Automatically harvesting content into the university’s faculty profiles and repository is a dream of many institutions looking for solutions to save their staff valuable time. Besides streamlining library projects, harvesting can bring value to groups on campus who need to see the full range of faculty scholarship. Updated infrastructure and a new, more efficient development process means that bepress is beginning to turn the dream of automated population into a reality. The new harvesting tool collects metadata from published journal articles as well as materials like conference papers and datasets from a large array of disciplines—not just STM fields—and shows publications in relation to affiliated institutions. This project briefing will discuss bepress’s research, development, and pilot phases. It will include details about the tool, and the process of selecting a source that provides access to 160 million objects from databases including PubMed, Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, Springer, IEEE, ArXiv, SSRN, RePec, and JSTOR. Lessons learned from an invaluable group of pilot testers that challenged assumptions and pushed to improve workflows for a variety of campus needs will be discussed. The session will provide a framework for approaching this type of technical evaluation and development, as well as information about bepress’s current and upcoming plans for harvesting.