Monday, March 17, 2008

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Senior Capstone Experience is the first collection we put up on DSpace, most of them are unpublished papers, so we create the collection with different levels of privileges.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.

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