What Is This?!? Inheriting an Established Institutional Repository

ScholarWorks, the Institutional Repository at UMass Boston was created in 2012 and has been understaffed for most of its existence. Despite the staffing challenges, the use of ScholarWorks has been continuous. Submissions have recently reached over 8,100 while the number of total downloads has exceeded 4 million. In 2023, Healey Library prioritized the renewal of this resource with a focus on supporting open scholarship by hiring staff to work in these areas. Since then, these newly hired librarians have solved many mysteries around the inner workings of this institutional repository and developed plans to continually improve and promote the resource. In this session, Christine Moynihan, the UMass Boston Scholarly Communications, Data, and Affordable Learning Librarian, and Lydia Burrage-Goodwin, the Scholarly Projects Librarian, will outline the steps that they took to gain intellectual control of the UMass Boston Institutional Repository. They will discuss how they organized and synthesized an immense amount of information from a decade of submissions, gathered and analyzed the historical context of policies and decisions created upon the inception of the IR, established workflows for supporting users and administering the backend, updated FAQs, resource pages, and LibGuide; and implemented a website redesign and organizational structure update. They will highlight the specific work involved with the website redesign that includes: performing an environmental scan of similar institutional repositories to gauge their preferences; building colorful wireframes to visualize their desired changes; setting up a week-long work-from-home co-working sprint to focus on this project; and continually collaborating with the vendor throughout the process. They will also review their future resource planning and lessons they learned.