TAI CHI Webinar tomorrow on SEO for Institutional Repositories
Our OCLC Research colleagues host an amazing set of Webinars, called TAI CHI which has nothing to do with martial arts or yoga. Other than the fact that the webinars almost always stretch my brain in new directions and remind me how awesome it is to have such a thoughtful, lively community of thinkers around us. The next one coming up is tomorrow, check it out:
TAI CHI Webinar on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Institutional Repositories
with Kenning Arlitsch and Patrick OBrien from the University of Utah
Friday, 16 March at 12 Noon MDT/2 p.m. EDT (UTC 18:00)
Follow or tweet this webinar with #orseo
Attend this webinar to learn more about SEO techniques that can significantly improve the indexing ratios of institutional repositories in Google Scholar.
More emphasis is being placed on assessment and measurement of university outputs. Institutional repositories have the potential to increase citation rates of authors which, in turn, can affect university rankings. However, the possibility of doing so may be seriously diminished if institutional repository content is invisible to the large and growing number of researchers who use Google Scholar.
Kenning Arlitsch and Patrick OBrien from the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah have conducted research on search engine optimization for digital repositories, with a special emphasis on institutional repositories (IRs). Part of the “Getting Found: Search Engine Optimization for Digital Repositories” project funded by IMLS, this work has revealed technical and administrative reasons many institutional repositories have a low indexing ratio in Google Scholar. Working with OCLC and Google Scholar, Kenning and Patrick implemented three pilot projects that led to the significant improvement of Google Scholar indexing of a sample set from the University of Utah’s Institutional Repository, USpace. The resulting research paper, Invisible Institutional Repositories: Addressing the Low Indexing Ratios of IRs in Google, appears in the current issue of Library Hi Tech.
In this webinar, Kenning and Patrick will provide an overview of their research and recommendations on how to improve the indexing ratios of institutional repositories in Google Scholar, including transforming metadata to Google Scholar-preferred schemas, based on what they accomplished with USpace.
Webinar participation is free and open to all but advanced registration is required.
Register here * to attend this free webinar via WebEx on 16 March 2012 at 12 Noon MDT/2 p.m. EDT (UTC 18:00).
This is the twelfth webinar in the OCLC Research Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) Webinar Series <http://www.oclc.org/research/events/taichi.htm> developed to highlight specific innovative applications, often locally developed, that libraries, museums and archives may find effective in their own environments, as well as to teach technical staff new technologies and skills. Recordings of these webinars are made available on the OCLC Research website and in iTunes.