Building A Digital Repository, Part III Metadata Creation

Our first project is Senior Capstone Experience. Metadata creation will start from senior theses. Firstly, we need convert WORD into PDF, which will be read only. We request that all the papers should be submitted with clear title, author full name, optional abstract and keyword, which will be ready to create metadata.

The default metadata scheme on DSpace is Dublin Core. We create and customize metadata according to the feature for each paper. Some papers provides more bibliographic information, such as table of contents, extra contributor to their paper, e.g. advisor, non-control vocabularies for keywords etc., we try to ingest more bibliographic information to our metadata creation, and create more access entries for users. At same time, it also means extra work for us, we need validate subject heading offered by authors. Theses which cross disciplinary will be linked to all related disciplines to ensure users can find them at any related departments. With medatada creation for each record, now users can search them.

Building A Digital Repository, Part II Access Control

When we talk about access control of your digital collection, some users might not be happy with it. Open access to scholarly publication is an ideal, but when you have to consider copyright issue for your institution, then a limited access control will give you such flexibility to make your digital collection available to authorized users.

Senior Capstone Experience is the first collection we put up on DSpace, most of them are unpublished papers, so we create the collection with different levels of privileges. Public have open access to search / browse the collection and view bibliographic information, but only authorized Washington College users can download the actual documents.

For other digital collection, such as digital archives, we provide open access to them, public can access them anytime, but cautiously using the collection. You can always control the access at the level of subcommunity or collection, which will make your pilot digital project easier at the preliminary exploration.

Building A Digital Repository, Part I Information Structure

Create information architecture is first thing you should consider before you start. A good information structure is easy for users to navigate and browse information on your site, otherwise, it really becomes an irregular and crowed repository without organizing and sorting, and eventually, with the rapid growth of digital content, users find nothing because of malfunction.

My best practice for our digital repository on DSpace is:

• decide what you want to deposit at your digital repository. You should have your collection policy to help you make decision on acquiring original materials
• create hierarchy information structure at community and subcommunity level by discipline, which eases users to browse collection
• arrange collection by subjects or special topics, give subcommunities more flexibility to create and manage collection

Once you have decided how you are going to do with the information structure, you can start to arrange your collection.

Building A Digital Repository

Building a digital repository seems a big thing to most of people, but you can always start with something small, concrete and under your control.

We are at a small liberal arts college, apparently, we want to effectively use all resources and provide better services and products for faculty and students. When we started to build the digital repository, we thought we not only provide a virtual place for digital collection, but also create a platform for our faculty and students to demonstrate their works and talents, share their views and promote their academic achievements. What we want to do here is to give each department flexibility to build their own community and collection for each specific disciplinary purpose, eventually, it will be interactive virtual community, which promotes research and scholarship, ultimately, students will have open access to electronic publications for their scholarly communication.

Electronic Publishing

Each year, each educational institution generates a certain amount of publications, such as newsletter, periodical and newspaper. Can we have open access to electronic publications and further encourage students to start scholarly communication on campus wide? The key here is students can have effective learning, and they will benefit from their preliminary scholarly achievement. Is this the objective of education?

This could be actualized on DSpace. In the virtual community, students experience a new journey to create knowledge from what they learn. The benefit of publishing, managing and editing digital collection will bring a motivation for campus scholarship and original productions.

Teaching and Learning with Multimedia

Today multimedia are heavily used in teaching and learning, multimedia bring new interactive experience of teaching and learning for both faculty and students. Our digital repository-DSpace can manage multimedia in the way you prefer . It gives you flexibility to design the collection with different access privileges. You can have audio and video files in mp3 or mp4. The most convenient is users can search or browse the collection by subject.

On the college digital repository, faculty and students can play with images, text, audio and video. The collection they build up there will benefit teaching and learning through resource sharing. For example, art project could be easily collected on DSpace via images; students of music and drama can shoot their concertos and drama productions lively to make them available on DSpace, and share their senior capstone experience with audiences all over the world. Our faculty can shoot their museum tours and deposit them on DSpace to share with the class. These collections are created by faculty and students, it will encourage faculty and students to teach and learn in more interactive way, bring more inflows and spark their ideas. The electronic publishing on campus wide will promote open access to resources that students and faculty create, and will absolutely encourage interactive teaching and learning, and eventually, impact on scholarly communication.