Digital Collection

Archives usually record college history and heritage, which is a valuable source for research and teaching. Digitizing archives is not only a good way to promote college history and culture, but also an effective means to maximize resource sharing globally. We'd better carefully preserve digital collection if we want more people to share the knowledge. Preservation of digital collection is a big challenge today. DSpace can help you handle your concerns at your lowest cost.

DSpace is able to manage images with various types of files, such as JPEG, MPEG, TIFF. Users can preview a thumbnail image when reading metadata. Digitizing archives is a good news for those who usually read archival documents in reading room. Once the digital collection are online available, they could access archives anywhere and anytime. The digital archives can bring you a spectacular experience, establish a stable and valuable source, and trace new findings in your most interesting fields.

Publishing on DSpace

Scholarship is one of the three pillars (teaching, scholarship and service) in college community. Faculty could put up their published and unpublished works on DSpace with control of rights to use. On one hand, it is convenient for faculty to link required reading list with their works, and make collections online searchable, which is an effective way to publicize themselves globally; on the other side, faculty can effectively demonstrate their publications in the class as they need.

Once you set up this connection, it will be well worthy to build up an easily navigated information architecture on DSpace. Faculty can access the collection anytime to trace research progress and interests, and also be reached by other researchers and audience to share their thoughts anytime and anywhere. DSpace exposes your research projects world wide and promote your scholarly publishing more than ever.

Sharing Senior Capstone Experience on DSpace

In summer 2007, we ended the history of collecting print senior theses, instead, senior students at Washington College submitted their electronic copies to Miller Library. This is a big change for both students and faculty. However, this change also incites their creation and my passion to make them online searchable as soon as I can.

We have a great team at Miller Library, we convert various files to PDF firstly. Then I start to create the information architecture on DSpace to hold all kinds of digital objects. Creating metadata for theses is a long process, but also very crucial for users to be able to search the collection online. It is a big challenge for me to validate keywords assigned by author for every single paper, especially without auto-indexing tool, but the process itself is full of fun!

Now you can search SCE collection by author, title, subject and keyword. Professors can demonstrate students with actual theses on DSpace in the class and share their analysis. DSpace is becoming a virtual community for students to conduct interactive learning and research. Is that mazing that technology is changing the world every second?

Teaching and Learning on DSpace

Digital library has become a popular virtual community for most educational institutions. Faculty and students start to create additional connection with digital library. Except collecting digital objects, a variety of contents can be created by faculty and students to support teaching and learning, to share different thoughts and promote interactive and effective learning. DSpace can help library manage culture heritage, intellectual properties and archives for the institution. In mean time, we need to find a systematical and efficient way to mange these metadata, which will facilitate users easily search and browse the digital collection. DSpace is open source software, which will capture digital objects in any format (text, video, audio, and data), and distribute them over the web. It indexes your work, so users can search and retrieve your items. It preserves your digital work over the long term¹. DSpace is affordable and easily customized, it supports browse and could be updated simultaneously. You can manage your different digital objects at community and collection level, you can control how to share and maintain your digital collection.

Teaching and learning on DSpace will give faculty and students greater flexibility and creativity in the community. People with common learning objective share their ideas and works to communicate and leverage their knowledge. DSpace is absolutely a feasible and effective tool to target their education purpose for both faculty and students.