We polled a variety of universities that have successfully launched DSpace. They share here the most important lessons they learned in marketing their DSpace services:

• Ongoing communication on campus is vital. Go back to communities often, use newsletters, personal follow up, and phone calls to answer questions, remind community liaison to get new content added to DSpace.
• Timing is critical. Summer is a great time to market your service, if faculty are around. Also, summer is a good time for staff to learn something new. During the beginning and end of the semester, your message can be lost.
• Keep in close contact with existing communities. DSpace staff at one institution take turns contacting communities to post content and move the project forward. Having several team members contact the community avoids the feeling of nagging your community liaisons.
• Use success stories, quotations from faculty, and time lines for how long it takes to start a community to encourage other communities to get going.
• Work with the university?s Grants Office to reach faculty who need to demonstrate in grant proposals how their work will be distributed and preserved.
• Invest your time and money in getting a community going ? jump-start a successful service as a community test case.
• Different disciplines think differently, and have different content needs. Address them specifically.
• Educate faculty about issues of digital scholarship, preservation, etc. This makes it much easier to sell them on DSpace.
• Easy sells ? that is, showing faculty how easy it is to submit and find content.
• The persistent identifier for content is the single best selling point for DSpace when talking with faculty.
• Word-of-mouth among faculty and end-users is invaluable. When content contributors and users start using DSpace, word can spread quickly around your institution.
• Success doesn?t always follow immediately after you publish an article, make a presentation, persuade a faculty member to preserve his/her work. Your marketing efforts pay off eventually, even if it doesn?t feel that way immediately.