Increasing Usage - Planning Checklist

The planning checklists to be found in each key section of the RSP web site are offered as a series of key questions designed to ‘make you think'. Please note that we have not crowded presentation by trying to offer answers to the questions, many of which may be local or specific to each institution.

In this section about increasing usage you have a repository, you have some content and now you want it to start appearing in search engines, etc. Here are the questions to ask yourself:

• Have you announced the creation of your repository by registering it as a data provider?
• Have you considered using a sitemap to help search engines index the repository?
• Have you customised the robots.txt file to hide areas of your repository from search engines?
• Have you checked your OAI-PMH output? Are your metadata fields populated with the correct data?
• Have you customised the OAI-PMH Identify verb response?
• Have you thought what other services might like to access/search your repository and provided them with useful interfaces?
• Have you considered what the repository can do for its users? When you have, tell them!
• Who would like to hear about your repository? Make a list then invite them to a repository coffee morning!
• Have you considered the communication channels within the institution - Newsletters, RSS feeds, Departmental Homepages?
• Have you considered writing for a journal/professional newsletter/RSP Case Study about your experience?
• Have you considered how to add value to your institutional repository?