Evaluating the I-WIRE project

Overview of the project

The I-WIRE Project was a two-year JISC funded project to establish a quick deposit tool that would enable academic and administrative staff to deposit publication data and full text items easily into Cardiff University's institutional repository, Online Research @ Cardiff (ORCA), with the ultimate aim to make ORCA a central function in the day to day research management processes at Cardiff. The project took a user centric approach to gathering requirements, with individual interviews with stakeholders and group discussions with academic authors. 

The project's output, Manage My Publications, is integrated into Cardiff University's intranet with three choices of deposit route: quick deposit, which asks for the minimum amount of publication data to be entered and is auto-populated as much as possible for ease of deposit; DOI deposit, which used CrossRef to automatically populate the publication data; and Web of Science deposit, which similarly searches the Web of science database for an author's publications. All three were developed from user suggestions, as was the Selected Publications feature.

Alpha testing began in December 2010 with members of Information Services staff, and continued in January 2011 with volunteer testers from academic schools. Beta testing with selected schools began in March, and a gradual rollout over the academic year.

Challenges Faced

The project was late starting due to a lengthy recruitment process which resulted in the scope of the requirements gathering phase being reduced, but with effective management this was overcome.

The project was required initially to work with a pre-existing IBM system. As the project progressed it became apparent that components of this system would not be fully available within the project's timescales, so an alternative technical solution was proposed. This caused some delay to the technical development on the project.

As usual, issues surrounding copyright and publisher's open access policies threatened to prove a barrier to engagement with the project and the repository. Strictly speaking, such concerns, while valid, are outside the scope of the project and user education will be part of the planned advocacy project.

Lessons Learned

The successful delivery of the quick deposit tool, Manage My Publications, can be attributed in part to the fact that the project was engaged with users from the start; having user requirements drive projects like these is essential for success.

A dedicated project team, plus representatives from different academic and administrative communities on the Project Management Group, was essential in the success of the project, ensuring that it did not 'drift' and that issues were kept firmly in scope.

Strong communications, both internally and externally, were also a key part of the project. The team raised awareness of the project and its goals and developments by regular agenda items at high-profile committees and working groups, presentations at library service briefings and at national and international conferences, and by maintaining a website, blog and Twitter account.

Looking forward

The project has fulfilled its objective of delivering a quick deposit tool and received very good feedback from users. There are a number of issues however that need to be considered and addressed in the next few months in order to successfully embed the tool in the University's research management processes:

While deposit has been made easy for users, the mediated approach means that there needs to be a suitable level of staff resources available to ensure the quality of the data entered into ORCA.

An Advocacy and Embedding Project has been approved by the University Library Service and our next steps are to discuss with subject librarians how they can help to publicise ORCA and Manage My Publications within their individual academic schools.

The integration of Manage My Publications with existing and varied school workflows and systems needs to be carefully considered and managed.

The ongoing maintenance and support of the complex systems used in Manage My Publications is essential.

For further detailed information on the outcomes of the I-WIRE project, please follow the link to the external evaluation report: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/resources/iwire/Evibase%20Summative%20evaluation%20of%20the%20IWIRE%20project.pdf

This is the final blog entry for the official I-WIRE project but we will be keeping you up to date with the rollout of Manage My Publications and further developments with ORCA. Watch this space!