Presentation at NITLE DSpace User Community Meeting 2008

NITLE DSpace User Community Meeting

NITLE DSpace User Community Meeting was held on June 11-12, at University Peget Sound, Tacoma, WA. All the participating institutions have sent their information professionals at the meeting.

It is a great opportunity for participates to share their best practices and also address their concerns. Topics such as institutional repository, digital collection, metadata creation, DSpace Manakin, marketing DSpace etc. have been fully discussed. Most librarians feel that DSpace provides a great opportunity for institutions to create digital collections and scholarly communication on campus wide, but how to effectively promote it on campus and create value-added collection for research will be the key to succeed. NITLE agrees to continue providing such opportunities to facilitate best practices.

ETDs Collection on DSpace

Washington College started to create digital collection of ETDs in 2007, now all Senior Capstone Experiences are available on DSpace. But senior students still do not submit their theses directly to DSpace, instead, they have to submit theses to blackboard or the library by email. Then the Metadata Librarian has to create metadata and deposit theses on DSpace one by one. I think this is time-consuming and very low efficient. Since the workflow of creating metadata for theses could be customized, so I can design a new default workflow for senior students to directly submit their theses to DSpace. This is the purpose that we choose DSpace as our digital repository originally.

Some faculty might question whether undergraduate students could deposit theses on their own. I would like to trust them. Through step-by-step guide and elaborately designed workflow, senior students will make it correctly and efficiently. Probably, I should work on designing such new default workflow model first, and then I will teach them how to use it. I wish we can make this happen by 2009.

Miller Library Presented Digital Collection of ETDs at CALD Annual Spring Meeting 2008

On April 11, 2008, College Librarian Dr. Ruth Shoge presented Washington College Digital Repository DSpace at CALD (Congress of Academic Library Directors of Maryland) Annual Spring Meeting 2008.

The Congress of Academic Library Directors (CALD) of Maryland is an organization open to library directors in post-secondary institutions in Maryland. Dr. Shoge made a presentation on “ DSpace, a place for senior thesis.” This year, CALD Annual Spring Meeting focuses on digitization and Maryland library digital projects. Presenters from University of Maryland, Towson University and Johns Hopkins University also shared their digital projects.

Dr. Shoge presented the rationale that we chose DSpace as our DdigiTool, and how the librarians made the collection of ETDs available to college community. This is first time Miller Library officially publicizes our digital collection at academic library community.

Building A Digital Repository, Part IV Publicizing Digital Collection

Good product needs to be promoted in an effective way, especially the collection created by the library. We decide to publicize the digital collection on campus wide and beyond campus. Firstly, we try to join consortium user group meetings to exchange the experience from what I have done. On the other side, I have to convince faculty that this is convenient, accurate and easy-access resource, and students will initially taste what it looks like when they have scholarly publications on DSpace.

I know we will have a long way to go, but we are going to employ campus newspaper ELM, presentations and library instruction to publicize the digital collection. In mean time, I will make the digital collection available on our ILS, so users will eventually use it no matter where they will access the collection

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.