Enhancing an Open-Access Linguistics Journal Archive with Library of Congress-like Metadata: A Case Study of the Effectiveness for Improving Discovery

Abstract

The University of Kansas has hosted the Kansas Working Papers in Linguistic (KWPL) in its digital repository, KU ScholarWorks, since 2007, but complete subject metadata, based on Library of Congress Subject Headings, was added only in 2013. The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of adding Library of Congress subject headings in enhancing discoverability and increasing downloads. Results have provided compelling evidence that the additional metadata has led to an overall increase of downloads from KWPL by 66% in the year following the addition of the enhanced metadata.

Keywords

• Metadata
• Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH)
• federated searching
• institutional repositories
• open-access publishing
• Linguistics