Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Digitizing Dissertations For An Institutional Repository: A Process And Cost Analysis, Mary E. Piorun, Lisa A. Palmer

Lisa A. Palmer

Objective: This paper describes the Lamar Soutter Library’s process and costs associated with digitizing 300 doctoral dissertations for a newly implemented institutional repository at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Methodology: Project tasks included identifying metadata elements, obtaining and tracking permissions, converting the dissertations to an electronic format, and coordinating workflow between library departments. Each dissertation was scanned, reviewed for quality control, enhanced with a table of contents, processed through an optical character recognition (OCR) function, and added to the institutional repository.

Results: Three hundred and twenty dissertations were digitized and added to the repository for a cost of $23,562, …

Anatomy Of An Institutional Repository: Dissecting The Metadata Process, Lisa A. Palmer

Lisa A. Palmer

In 2006 the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School licensed ProQuest’s Digital Commons institutional repository (IR) software and launched eScholarship@UMMS. The goals were to provide a showcase for the medical school’s research, teaching, and scholarship; promote open access to research; and make available an easy way for faculty and researchers to promote and distribute their work. To date the Library has established five distinct collections. Each collection varies in scope and in the way the Library acquires the content. This variation poses many challenges for metadata creation and maintenance. Each collection entails the establishment of record …

Digitizing Dissertations For The Escholarship@Umms Institutional Repository, Mary E. Piorun, Lisa A. Palmer

Lisa A. Palmer

Our presentation will describe the process and costs associated with our first digitization project: digitizing 300 doctoral dissertations for a newly implemented institutional repository at UMass Medical School. We will start at the beginning: selecting team members and identifying their roles, choosing the right repository system, and identifying a manageable first project. We will explain how we partnered with our Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and contacted alumni for permission to digitize their dissertations. We will also discuss technical information and decisions such as software and equipment used to scan and create searchable text, using OCR technology to convert abstracts, …

Levels Program: A Career Ladder For Support Staff, Jane Fama, James F. Comes, Vivian (Frempong) Okyere, Barbara Ingrassia, Kerry Mayotte, Lisa A. Palmer, Mary E. Piorun

Lisa A. Palmer

ObjectiveHow do we manage support staff development in the modern health sciences library? Increasingly, the need for more highly skilled staff is evident. This poster describes a three phase project encompassing the development, approval, and implementation processes necessary to make a career ladder a reality in a medium-sized academic health sciences library.

MethodsThe Management Team gathered information from library literature and business and government sources as a starting point. In the development phase, the team posed questions as the foundation for developing a competency-based program to manage support staff development. e.g., What will support staff be doing in …