The topic for this meeting of the Technology SIG was Institutional Repositories. The meeting was facilitated by Denise Garofalo of Mount Saint Mary College, and featured a presentation from Joanna DiPasquale and Carolyn Moritz of Vassar College.
Vassar’s Islandora/Fedora software for repository
PROBLEM: students want to save capstone projects that include websites, compositions, and things that are other than papers. FEDORA is extensible – you can put all kinds of things into it
Installation and maintenance are the pain points for creating a repository. It’s one of the benefits of BPress. It’s hard to give up something that’s as fully featured as a product like that.
ISLE and LASIR exist to figure out how to provide those features in a custom project.
Vassar does not have an open access publication fund – they are looking at it because it’s a huge help. How would one work? Coming up with a policy would include trying to figure out how to apply it.
Policies: What is needed… Sparc shares policies from other intuitions, larger ones like Harvard keep theirs on a wiki.
Quality control is one issue to address. (CIA has one that is “by invitation only” from professors choosing student work and selecting it by committee.) Vassar takes student work that is their thesis, so it’s gone through a form of peer review. Vassar has a faculty committee that advises the library. They decided to let the departments decide what they submit. They honor take down requests in case students either decide to remove something or publish it later. They have an opt-out form, but it has not been used yet.
Copyright: Vassar puts the burden on the faculty member to make sure there is no copyrighted material put into the repository. Students can choose what level of copyright they want to apply to the material. They also include a statement that the students are not transferring their rights, and encourage them to make materials available via open access.
How much education do you give students about copyright? Bard students go through copyright clearance before submitting, and that’s done on the department level.
The words “pilot” and “repository” don’t go together. They need to be sustained, and the data should be thought of as forever, even if the technology changes. There needs to be an exit strategy. With Fedora, that’s easier, because all the data can be harvested. It is for long-term preservation. The hitch with using vendors is that contracts expire. Redundancy helps that problem.
Joanna has flipped her solution to: Let the faculty put their stuff wherever they want, as long as you grab a copy for the repository. Don’t get stuck on being the first place for faculty to put their things. Meet them where they are and then you don’t end up having conversations that are just about technology, you’re talking about cataloging, subject headings, and other related questions. The type of repository no longer matters as much.
Grad students look to faculty publications to decide where they want to go. Undergrads don’t do that as much, and that’s a difference in how universities vs. colleges view their repositories. At universities, faculty work becomes of interest to marketing & communications for that reason.
Islandora uses MODS metadata, and that has a crosswalk to Dublin Core. There is also citation language that can work with endnote and refworks.
Mount Saint Mary College uses publication from faculty as a “meal ticket” to the faculty luncheon. You get an invite when you send your citations.
PCC Cooperative cataloging is developing a program to ISNI – creating profiles for authors. It’s the umbrella organization to be part of the group. They are also doing a wikidata pilot to create new author profiles. NACO – Name Authority Cooperative Program
View the presentation slides on Drive here (This view also includes the notes.)
or see below:
Digital library platforms
Discovery layers – signal to noise ratio Arianna can facilitate that one
Hosted vs. onsite – self-hosting and working with the cloud
Related: the Cataloging SIG will meet on January 16, 2019 and will be talking about authorities.
There are more related links embedded in the presentation above!