DSpace is an open-source software package that provides insitutional repository capability.
Links to all the information you could ever want to know:
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:
Smaller Institutions often don't have a mandate for preservation or a drive to raise their institutional profile. We do share the following, however, with our larger brethren:
- Your users want online content.
- You have unique collections on your campus that you could offer to the online information stream.
- There is a potential workload reduction in digitizing materials.
- You want your library to provide added value to your campus.
Smaller Institutions don't, perhaps, have a huge corpus of published faculty research. What we do have is:
- (Enough) Faculty Research Many of your faculty are publishing articles that could be archived to the benefit of your campus, even if you don't have the research output of a larger institution.
- Faculty-student Research Collaborations Many small institutions pride themselves on their relationship with their students, and on the work their students do. Showcase it!
- Student portfolios Students across disciplines are interested in (or required to) produce and provide a portfolio of their accomplishments. Can the library help facilitate that?
- Library Collections Campus photos,yearbooks, local histories. Pathfinders, reference guides, local bibliographies. Professional development tools, presentations, newsletters. What's YOUR library producing?
- Image collections Does your art department have a slide collection with appropriate copyrights? Does your campus have an art collection that can and should be digitally documented? What about the portfolios of art faculty?
- Thesis Collections Does your campus or your library archive the thesis work of your graduate students? Could it be made more accessible by digitizing?
- Institutional publications Event proceedings, output of campus festivals or symposia, locally produced journals or publications, institutional documents, minutes, working group reports, task force recommendations... any of the intellectual product of your campus.
- Unique Campus Resources DSpace can hold anything -- what is unique to your campus?
Bottom line, small campuses cannot singlehandedly change scholarly communication by digitizing a massive body of open-access scholarship. But we have so much to offer to the body of online information -- don't sell your resources short.
Many sources will tell you the first step to any technology project is to choose the software and necessary hardware, but...
OLIS has removed that hurdle by providing DSpace access to all SUNY campuses.
DSpace at SUNY
They are currently providing hardware, software, implementation, and staff support to campuses who want to move forward with an IR on DSpace. While you are not obligated to use DSpace, OLIS is providing a valuable resource not only in hardware and software, but in staff time for implementation and management.
DSpace has a checklist and supporting documents on
Building an Institutional Repository. We used them to tailor our own approach.
- Identify staff who will lead/participate in IR
- Define mission of Repository in draft Policy document
- Establish copyright policy
- Define community hierarchy
- Work with OLIS to implement decisions
- Identify initial content collection to load
- Establish process for loading content
- Define core metadata for all items in Repository
- Load test collection!
- Recruit content providers using test collection as example
- Revisit Policy and procedures documents based on experience.
IRs are, for most small institutions, add-on projects.
- Who on your staff is interested in IRs, digital archives, campus outreach, or scholarly communication?
- Who has the knowledge -- digital, archival, metadata, copyright, etc -- to facilitate the project?
- Who has the time?
Involve those people up front; their input and enthusiasm can be invaluable!
Why do you want an IR? What do you hope to accomplish for your library? For your campus? For the greater community?
We decided that:
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.
Librarians love (or hate) copyright, and institutional repositories are a copyright dream (or nightmare). You will need to consider:
- Do you want a blanket copyright statement for your IR?
- Who will manage copyright issues? The IR manager? The submitting author? Someone else?
- Who will educate publishing faculty about their rights regarding copyright issues? **
- How will you handle challenges to copyright, from publishers or from authors?
- Will you need to limit access to materials to on-campus-use? Is this something you want to do?
** SPARC's Copyright for Authors page provides one perspective on the issue, as does Cornell's Copyright Management resource page.
DSpace organizes content in a hierarchy of Communities and Sub-Communities. What's the ideal information architecture for your project?
Practical example:
We considered the possibility of organizing faculty research into three sub-communities around our three Schools. The idea was rejected once we discussed the fact that Music Education would fall inside the Crane School of Music, but publications by Music Education faculty should be easily access at the same time as School of Education publications.
Then, work with OLIS to set up what you decide upon. Post your mission statement, your copyright policy, and your logo on the DSpace at SUNY site. Set up your collections, and...
We chose to begin with our Masters Thesis collection, for several reasons:
- We have ongoing and increasing ILL and Archives use of our thesis collection
- It satisfies our mission to "showcase and preserve the intellectual accomplishments" of SUNY Potsdam
- We have control over the collection
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 your faculty to add their own publications with no librarian intervention?
- Do want to designate a single point person who will load all content?
- Does some combination work best for you?
No matter who loads your content, it all needs metadata.
- What fields does your repository need?
- Which fields need to be standardized?
- Which fields need to be included on every item, and which are optional?
- How can Dspace's metadata scheme -- Dublin Core with Qualifiers -- be made to accommodate your identified needs?
- Who will add the metadata? Will someone proofread it after it is added?
Once you've figured out the metadata, load your first collection.
Now that you have content loaded, you can go show it off.
(You can always do what I did, which is show off other people's repositories, but isn't it more impressive if you can show your own work?)
In the realm of outreach, you will have to go to your faculty and colleagues. You will have to sell the repository concept, and demonstrate its worth in terms that your campus colleagues can relate to.
And then you have to not give up.
See
Marketing an IR, posted by Dorothea Salo, the
Digital Repository Services Librarian at George Mason University, for a practitioner's take on IR outreach.
Don't bother with long involved planning sessions. Don't bother with marketing committees at first (though later on, it may well help to share information). Brainstorm a page of ideas, pick some to try, and try them. When some don't pan out, pick others. Embrace serendipity. Listen to and act on what people tell you about the IR, and about faculty beliefs and practices.
Once you've begun loading content, navigating your architecture, and accessing your metadata, ask:
- What's working?
- What's not working?
- What can we do better?
and,
- Who can we reach out to, next?
Jenica P. Rogers is the Collection Development Coordinator and Technical Services Librarian at the SUNY Potsdam College Libraries.
In addition to the daily work of managing the College Libraries' collections and leading in technical services, her current projects include setting up a DSpace repository for the campus, cataloging electronic resources, collaborating with the School of Education and Professional Studies' Sheard Literacy Center to set up a branch library, and writing articles about all those experiences.
She got her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin--Madison in 2001, and a BA in English from Trinity College in Hartford, CT in 1998.
CV and more info available online, here.
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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