Document Type

Presentation

Journal/Book Title/Conference

North American Serials Interest Group

Publication Date

6-10-2012

Abstract

A great deal of the professional literature is devoted to developing content and faculty buy-in for institutional repositories. However, little is known about the end users of these repositories. This is unfortunate since great content is of little value if no one uses it and knowing more about users and their needs leads to more relevant content. So, we need to ask ourselves: "Who exactly is using this stuff, anyway?" Since 2010, Utah State University has begun surveying its IR users to answer this question. DigitalCommons@USU houses more than 26,000 documents with full-text downloads of over 800,000. With this much content and activity, our 3-year old repository has matured to a point that we are beginning to shift our focus from just seeking content to understanding our users, their needs, and how we can better meet those needs. In this presentation, we will share the results of our survey, discuss the implications of the results, and propose future directions of investigation.

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