Automating Workflow: From a Trickle to a Stream

Ideally, bulking up an institutional repository with a full listing of faculty publications is a worthy goal, but how can that be accomplished within a reasonable time period? Cleveland State University implemented Digital Commons in March 2012 with the KickStart program. Since then, faculty publications have been added at a steady, but slow pace. Through a collaborative effort, our Digital Initiatives Librarian worked with others to refine batch processing to increase the flow of record creation and document loading into EngagedScholarship@CSU. With the use of Excel, scripts, faculty CVs and Google Drive, the staff is finding new ways to automate the process of populating our IR. This presentation will discuss the technical components that move the process along and the personnel components that make this process work. CSU is also exploring the use of bibliographic information reported from Faculty Annual Activity Reports (FAAR) to capture current faculty scholarly activities.