ScholarSpace and Scholarly Communication: A Needs Assessment

Abstract

ScholarSpace, the institutional repository at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is still in early stages of development. But two prominent questions need to be addressed during this development. How can faculty members be encouraged to readily deposit their work to ScholarSpace? What can the repository developers do to assist and encourage this process? Since the repository is being developed in order to capture and preserve the intellectual output of the University, as ScholarSpace begins to grow, the developers want to avoid a phenomenon observed at other institutional repositories: a struggle with populating the repositories with content. This paper explores this situation and discusses a needs assessment conducted at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to understand how an institutional repository can best meet the scholarly needs of faculty and researchers at that campus. The needs assessment was created and delivered in an online format addressing faculty, researchers, and graduate students at the Manoa campus. Results indicated that, though a majority of respondents would find it helpful to distribute their work in an institutional repository, a substantial number will need further information about the repository. Results also indicated that there are a number of critical issues that will need to be addressed to the UH Manoa academic community in order to make the repository a success. The results are presented and the issues more thoroughly discussed in this paper.