Paul Stainthorp just blogged this on The Winch. The Repository is an important way you can make your research more “visible” to the wider academic community, and the support provided by the Library will be invaluable in facilitating this:

We want to make your research easier to find, so the Library’s team of two professional cataloguers have now been appointed for an additional 2 days a week, to catalogue and improve records on the University’s repository of scholarly work.

http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk

“The University of Lincoln’s Institutional Repository exists for the permanent deposit of research and conference papers, e-theses, student projects and teaching and learning materials produced by our community of staff and students. Repository content can be browsed or searched through this website or through searching Google. Wherever possible, repository content is freely available for download and use according to our Copyright and Use Notice.”

Now, when you deposit your work in the repository, the University Library will create a full item description and record (analogous to a bibliographic record in the University’s library catalogue), using any outline data you provide on deposit, combined with accurate cross-referenced information from a range of bibliographic sources.

• This is important because a work deposited in the repository is made publicly accessible (by default), and becomes almost immediately ‘findable’ by academic search services such as Google Scholar. People searching for scholarly work in your field will be much more likely to discover your own work if it is properly described and catalogued.

• This ‘findability’ benefits you because analysis has shown that citation rates increase by between 25% – 250% when a paper is deposited in an open-access Institutional Repository. Recently, the HEFC have stated that metrics (including citation rates) will play an important role in the next research exercise (the REF or Research Excellence Framework).

• The cataloguers will also work to ensure that deposited items are not in breach of publishers’ licence conditions, and that their presence on the repository does not breach copyright. Journal publishers are generally supportive of researchers who want to deposit a version of their work in a repository, though they will often attach conditions to such deposit.

If you’d like to discuss the description of your work in the repository with the cataloguers, please email: eprints@lincoln.ac.uk

There’s a simple guide to depositing material in the repository available online.