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“Suddenly people are talking about open access on campus in a way they hadn’t before,” says Susan Gibbons, vice provost and dean of River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester. “And it’s going to push the need for repositories front and center again.”

Ms. Gibbons’ prediction is from an article today in WIRED CAMPUS that describes how and why the University of Rochester is creating new institutional repository software.

Included in what will be offered to authors to lure them to contribute their papers and dissertations are “collaborating with colleagues” and customized “researcher pages.” In findability terms, the collaborating (1) gives link love to the ideas that interest colleagues and (2) puts online customized landing pages. Thus, the Rochester is not only making knowledge in their depository open, it is giving the ideas that attract collaboration some highly merited findability.

What are these two findability principles?

(1) Link love. Here is Wikipedia”s definition: “Link love is a term used in the fields of search engine optimization and blogging to describe the effect that web pages rank better when they have more and higher quality links pointing at them”. Thus, when colleagues collaborate in the Rochester open repository, the knowledge webpages they choose to visit and to link to get their love, and are therby nudged up the emergence ranks of their subjects within the the global open knowledge commons.
Example: In this sample page from a Rochester researcher, the range of love links is 1-136.  The page with 136 is getting a lot more link love, increasing its findability. (Although the fact that the actual articles are bundled in PDFs instead of having their full text online, blocks their ability to receive link love internally, the abstracts on the article pages provide excellent keywords that do put the articles into the open online ranking arena.)

(2) Landing Pages. The search engine optimization (SEO) industry now fine tunes e-commerce websites to attract visitors to items where action is profitable (think, sign-up for news or order a product). A top SEO guru Tim Ash describes landing page optimization. The “researcher pages” the new Rochester project creates are natural landing pages. Educators who learn the ropes of site tuning can make what they teach findable (think, this is what is important to learn that I have put on this page) by tuning these pages.

About the League of Librarians image: Handschooling does not end nurture! Click the image above to learn how Rochester University librarians are using their inner superheroes to give personal help to students. Online findability and student nurture go hand-in-hand.