The SUNY Potsdam Institutional Repository

• The Wikipedia definition: "Institutional repository refers to the digital collection, capturing and preserving of intellectual and research output of a university community. ... Often, the objectives of having an institutional repository are to provide open access to institutional materials, to offer the opportunity for long term storage and preservation of digital assets, and to aid the management of often easily forgotten (grey) literature, such as theses or technical reports."
• The DSpace definition: "A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution."
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An introduction to IRs:

• The Case for Institutional Repositories, prepared by SPARC, the scholarly publishing arm of ARL
• Institutional Repositories : Hidden Treasures, by Miriam Drake, in InfoToday's Searcher
• Using repositories to support student scholarship by Mark Smith, NYS College of Ceramics at Alfred University

The main conversation regarding IRs has focused on what many consider to be the realm of large institutions:

• Open-Access IRs are increasingly recognized as an integral part of scholarly communication, and, as open-access information streams, are being promoted as a means of reshaping the for-profit scholarly communication landscape.
• Preservation Digital preservation is a major issue in our ever-increasingly electronic information environment, and IRs are one tool in the archiving and preservation arsenal.
• Ownership Institutions are reclaiming their research product, archiving copies of the scholarship produced by their faculty without relying on publisher access to do so.
• Reputation Publicise a campus's research output by gathering it together, branding it, and making it searchable and browseable, highlighting the quality of the research done by that campus.
  Also,
  
• Access Increased accessibility of scholarship online -- IRs allow for pre-print archiving, reducing time-to-print access, and also make digital copies of scholarship available for classroom and campus use.
• Search Increased searchability of scholarship online -- IRs are spidered by major search engines, and many IRs appear in Google Scholar search results.

Examples to inspire us all, from near and far:

• UBDigit, Digital Collections at the University of Buffalo
• Cornell's DSpace repository, and Cornell's Digital Collections
• Portfolio @ Duke
• Mason Archival Repository Service (MARS), at George Mason University.

Institutions like ours, with a strong focus on teaching and learning, often don't have the same goals as larger institutions.

Size-independent truths:

• Our users want online content.
• We have unique collections on our campus that could be moved online.
• There is a potential workload reduction in digitizing materials.
• We want our work to provide added value to our campus.

Why not just another campus-hosted website? Why a repository?

• Searchability: DSpace's metadata features allows researchers to find content more easily
• Archiving features: Longer online lifespan than other servers or web sites -- repositories are intended to be long-term preservation and access tools
• Permanence and maintenanceHow many websites and projects have languished and died, un-updated, because the person who started, hosted, and managed the site retired, moved on, or lost interest? The repository is centralized, managed by a group not an individual, and is not subject to changes in campus web servers or CMS modifications.
• Broader access: Libraries SUNY libraries are all linking to the SUNY DSpace instance, making work accessible across the state and beyond.
• Broader access: Search engines Google gives preferential treatment to institutional repositories in Googe Scholar
• Recognized method of capturing scholarly output: many research institutions have embraced IRs
• Simplified copyright for research: IRs are recognized by many publishers as a viable method of archiving works prior to or post-publication.

Our repository runs on DSpace, as a subset of the DSpace at SUNY portal, which offers access to collections across all SUNY units.

DSpace at SUNY

The SUNY Office of Library and Information Services is currently providing hardware, software, implementation, and staff support to all SUNY campuses.

DSpace is an open-source software package that provides insitutional repository capability.

Links to all the information you could ever want to know (and more):

• Welcome to DSpace, The DSpace Federation portal -- news, background information, tons of links
• Building an IR with Dspace
• DSpace wiki
• Introduction to DSpace aimed at Faculty

Truth 1: We are not the largest producer of faculty research in SUNY.

Truth 2: We do have:

• (Enough) Faculty research and creative endeavors
• Faculty-student research collaborations
• Student portfolios
• Image collections from across campus
• Theses and culminating projects from our graduate programs
• Institutional newsletters, reports, and other publications
• Recordings of campus performances
  
  No single facet of our intellectual output will make a viable repository on its own. But the work we do here is worth showcasing and sharing.

• Student Masters Theses (this is up and running, starting with the Spring '06 graduates)
• Faculty research repository (about to begin!)
• LTEC collections (about to begin!)
• Several more tentative ideas...
• What do YOU have?

Why do you want to use the IR? Who is your intended audience? Why is the IR better than other websites?

Our Mission:
The mission of the SUNY Potsdam Institutional Repository (SPIR) is to provide a secure and searchable digital archive to showcase and preserve the intellectual accomplishments of our campus. This project takes advantage of the SUNY Digital Repository using the open source system DSpace, and is operating in this pilot phase under the leadership of the College Libraries. The SUNY Potsdam Institutional Repository will provide opportunities for faculty and campus offices to make their research and creative endeavors available to a broader audience, and will expand the campus awareness of digital access and preservation initiatives.

Do you own the digital copyright to your publications? Check your publishers' agreements!

We do not claim copyright: creators retain the copyright to their work, unless it has been previously assigned to someone else.

Creators of submitted works must ascertain their own copyright owndership before submitting to our repository. See Cornell's Copyright Management resource page, the SPARC "Copyright for Authors" resources page and the SHERPA/ROMEO "List of Publisher Copyright Policies" for more information.

If copyright holders require that access to materials be limited to certain users, we may be able to accommodate these needs.

Items will be removed from the repository if copyright holders notify repository administrators of the need for removal. Administrators will not monitor copyright compliance, and will only make inclusion or removal decisions at the request of the copyright holder.

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Our DSpace-based repository organizes content in a hierarchy of Communities and Sub-Communities. Where does your content fit?

Practical example:
Faculty research might be divided into three sub-communities around our three Schools. However, Music Education would fall inside the Crane School of Music, but publications by Music Education faculty should be easily accessible at the same time as School of Education publications.

Departments might want to put faculty research into a departmental community along with student research projects and departmental newsletters, but that isolates each department from the work done by others.

Should all newsletters go together, or would they be better off sorted by offices?

We'll happily work with you to find the best solution.

Currently, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek and Keith Compeau are the campus repository managers. Dspace allows authors to submit and load their own content, or can be set up so that a single (or multiple) defined individual can add or accept content to the repository.

• Do you want to add your own publications with no administrative intervention?
• Do you want to work with Jenica and Keith to add your content?
• Do you want to assign your own metadata?
• Do you want to work with Jenica and Keith to assign metadata?
• Is your work already in digital format?
• Does someone need to scan hard copy before it can be loaded?
• Do you have resources to support scanning?
  
  Again, we will work with you to find the best solutions to these questions.
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There are lots of questions.

But there are more possibilities!

Working together, we can make a great repository that shows off the best of what we do.

If you're interested, come talk to us!

Jenica P. Rogers-Urbanek is the Collection Development Coordinator and Technical Services Librarian at the SUNY Potsdam College Libraries. Contact her at 267-3328, rogersjp@potsdam.edu, or in her office on the second floor of Crumb Library (at the end of the PT stacks!).

This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. There was no PowerPoint involved in this presentation except as a nagging bad example. The layout and stylesheet are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license, and were created and made available for download by Jessamyn West.
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