Proactive Institutional Repository Collection Development Techniques: Archiving Gold Open Access Articles and Metadata Retrieved with Web Scraping

Many institutions face low deposit rates with their institutional repositories despite investing substantial resources in implementing and supporting these systems. Deposit rates are higher in IRs that offer mediated deposits; however, this can be a time and labor intensive process. This article describes a method for copying open access articles and corresponding descriptive metadata from open repositories for archiving in an institutional repository using Beautiful Soup and Selenium as web scraping tools. This method quickly added hundreds of articles to an IR without relying on faculty participation or consulting publisher policies, increasing repository downloads and usage.