Digital Commons Network^™

A Dream Of Spring: Creation Of An Ir Managers Forum, Christy L. M. Shorey, Anna J. Dabrowski, Pamela Andrews, Erin Jerome

Charleston Library Conference

Sometimes it’s hard to find answers for work-related questions. This difficulty is compounded when one lacks the means to engage with a community of peers who face similar situations and problems. As institutional repository (IR) managers, we found ourselves with access to resources and listservs that didn’t quite fit our needs. Available discussion spaces were either too general in scope, drowning out repository-specific concerns; or too narrowly focused on platform-specific issues and technical details.

Lacking an appropriate forum, we decided to create a discussion space for IR managers. The IR Manager Forum (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/irmanagers) is designed to foster a community of …

Managing Etds: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Dan Tam Do, Laura Gewissler

Charleston Library Conference

Mandating contribution of theses and dissertations (TDs) to university archives and their electronic equivalents (ETDs) to an institutional repository (IR) is common practice. Optimizing workflows for archival print copies while managing electronic copies in an IR can be challenging given such factors as embargoes and the skill sets required to ensure theses and dissertations are accessible, discoverable, and ultimately safely stashed where they belong. As rational processes were gradually developed at the University of Vermont, pitfalls and breakthroughs presented themselves. This article relates our experience launching an ETD mandate, including campus outreach initiatives and improvements to the various related processes …

Supporting Research Information Management In The Research University: Partnerships, Challenges, And Possibilities, Rebecca Bryant, Beth Sandore Namachchivaya, Julie Speer

Charleston Library Conference

Research universities are increasingly engaging in complex efforts to collect and synthesize information about an institution’s research footprint. The collection, updating, and sharing of the campus’s bibliographic research outputs is an increasingly important part of this effort, as institutions seek to develop external profiling systems and enable collaborator discovery and to also increasingly internally understand the research strengths and synergies of an institution for planning and assessment. Institutions are adopting a variety of tools to support research information management (RIM), faculty activity reporting (FAR), and researcher collaboration and discovery on campus. In this presentation, we will talk about the complex …

The Open Movement: What Libraries Can Do, Sheila Corrall

Charleston Library Conference

Open approaches have moved beyond open access, open source software, and open courseware to developments with open infrastructure and open processes. Open initiatives are gaining momentum as a result of both bottom‐up grassroots activism and top‐down policy agenda. In a few instances, they have already reached a tipping point; but in many cases they are being pursued separately by specialist groups, suffering from fragmentation, and not always having their expected outcomes or impacts. Our study of open initiatives uses a simple overarching definition of open resources, and introduces a convenient framework enabling shared understanding of three different types of openness—open …