To celebrate the school’s centennial anniversary and recreate their origins, Santa Clara Law staged a reenactment of the famous Clarence Darrow trial. The event used real-life judges, attorneys, and law professors from around the country, and was attended by several hundred people, many of them donors, prospective donors, and alumni of the law school.
The Clarence Darrow reenactment now has a permanent residence in Santa Clara Law Digital Commons and it includes streaming videos of the reenactment as well as the actual statutes from the case—all available not just to the attendees but to a global audience. With this unique collection, SCU Law’s repository serves it purpose to preserve the school’s content– in this case both entertaining and historically significant.
In addition to paying homage to an important piece of legal history for Northern California, Santa Clara Law’s event also garnered support from their local law community: the reenactment cast included faculty from Santa Clara Law, Duke University School of Law, and American University Washington College of Law along with Santa Clara Law’s Dean and graduates, as well as three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals and the Northern District of California. Twelve members of the centennial graduating class served as jurors.
Capturing this collaboration in re-producing an important historical moment, this collection purports the importance of community engagement and faculty involvement.
Clarence Darrow Trial Re-Enactment – Conferences, Symposiums, and Events – Santa Clara Law
To see what Santa Clara Law has been up to, watch Building a Successful Law Repository with Limited Resources: http://digitalcommons.bepress.com/webinars/39/
The number of researchers using mobile devices to access content on Digital Commons and SelectedWorks has more than doubled each of the past two years. It now accounts for 10% of all traffic. Technology and the devices used to access scholarship continue to change at a rapid pace; bepress continually works to expand access to content hosted on the Digital Commons and SelectedWorks platforms.
While our original designs worked well on most mobile devices, we worked to provide an optimal browsing experience for the growing number of researchers on mobile devices. The new adaptive mobile design focuses on two points: allowing researchers to easily browse and access scholarship on mobile devices, and retaining institutional branding so that the institution and author receive credit for the work. Digital Commons and SelectedWorks will now automatically adapt to the reader’s device – resizing to fit the screen, ensuring browse-ability from the front page of the repository all the way down to the article.
You can see a few examples of the new mobile browse below. The 7.5 Digital Commons New Features webinar is available at http://digitalcommons.bepress.com/reference/71/ and release notes are available at http://digitalcommons.bepress.com/reference/70/ (the webinar and notes are restricted to Digital Commons subscribers; please contact your Consulting Services advisor for the password).
Pacific University Mobile Example
SelectedWorks Profile Mobile Example
To make some of Georgia’s legal history more readily accessible to a wider range of visitors, Sharon Bradley, Special Collections Librarian at the Alexander Campbell King Law Library at the University of Georgia School of Law, worked to digitize the university’s collection of Historic Georgia Digests and Codes in Digital Commons @ Georgia Law.
Prior to the digitization, requests for information required someone at the library to photocopy and PDF the articles in question, and each request ran the risk that the single copy of this old, delicate material would get lost or damaged. The Law Library is considered one of the main libraries of Georgia, so it’s no surprise that the library frequently fields requests for information about the state’s rich historical background.
The collection contains every iteration of Georgia law from the time it was established through 1981. When viewers see the completeness of the collection, as well as the clean, logical organization, they often remark that the collection contains exactly what they needed. Sharon reports that the majority of people interested in this content aren’t law students or practitioners, rather, people simply interested in Georgia’s historical land transactions and property laws. Not only does digitizing the material make it more easily available to everyone who seeks it—many of whom, surprisingly, are from out of state—but it preserves and archives a copy of the material.
1926 Code- by Thomas Johnson Michie, A. Hewson Michie et al.
What You Missed at ACRL
Congratulations are in order to all of you who presented at ACRL. For those unable to attend, here are links to the presentation materials of a few of the champions in the IR world. Please let us know about any we might have missed.
“Is an institutional repository right for your small college library?”
Janell Wertzberger, Gettysburg College
http://cupola.gettysburg.edu/librarypubs/12/
“Library Publishing and Undergraduate Education: Strategies for Collaboration”
Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Illinois Wesleyan University
Michael C. Seeborg, Illinois Wesleyan University
Isaac Gilman, Pacific University
Stephanie’s slides: http://works.bepress.com/stephanie_davis_kahl/38/
Isaac’s slides: http://commons.pacificu.edu/libfac/22/
“The Value of Library Publishing & Undergraduate Education”
Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Illinois Wesleyan University
http://works.bepress.com/stephanie_davis_kahl/39/
“Big Data, Small School: Growing Digital Curation Services at a Liberal Arts University”
Michael Hughes, Trinity University
Megan Toups, Trinity University
http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/lib_faculty/27/
“From Domestic Art to Graphic Design: Reflecting academic restructuring in institutional repositories”
Harrison W. Inefuku, Iowa State University
http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/digirep_conf/1/
“Not Just a Means to an End: Repositories, Marketing, and Development”
Emily Asch, St. Catherine University
http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2013/papers/Asch_NotJust.pdf
“Ditch Your Textbook: Academic Librarians Inspiring Faculty to go ‘Open’”
Steven Bell, Temple University
Marilyn S. Billings, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Mei-Yau Shih, University of Massachusetts – Amherst
Kristina Morris Baumli, Temple University
http://works.bepress.com/marilyn_billings/54/
Media Outlets Find Industry Experts from their Scholarship Made Freely Available Online
Michelle Jackson, the host of a radio program on Northern California’s KRXA radio station, recently discovered Professor Randy Albelda’s work on income disparity and economic policies that affect low-income women and families through professor Albelda’s Selected Works page. Albelda, a professor of economics and senior research fellow at the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is a distinguished and widely published scholar who is also used to working with advocacy groups and legislative bodies to apply the research to policy decisions. She welcomed this opportunity to talk about her current and recent work to a broader audience. The interview is scheduled for April 28, online at KRXA540.com.
This story reminded us of another faculty author who was invited to join a radio interview after the program hosts discovered his work in Digital Commons @ Butler University. Political Science Professor David Mason was a little surprised to be contacted by a Chinese radio station to participate in a roundtable on the topic of public-opinion research and reform in China, as his publications on that topic dated back to 1989. But when he Googled “public opinion research in China,” he found his publications in Digital Commons and SelectedWorks coming up very near the top of the results. Along with four other experts, including the head of Gallup China, Professor Mason was able to contribute an important recent-historical perspective.
That’s what discoverability is all about: bringing new life to older scholarship and finding broader audiences for recent work.
If you’re curious about SelectedWorks, contact your Consulting Services representative.
Randy Albelda’s SelectedWorks Page
Institutionally Branded PDF Cover Pages Might Just Be the Most Important Digital Commons Feature
We sometimes find that the most valuable features in Digital Commons are not necessarily the most obvious– in this instance, we are talking about the automatically generated PDF cover pages. At last check, we found that around 80% of all visitors to Digital Commons repository content landed directly on the PDF from a Google or Google Scholar search, meaning that these cover pages are quite possibly the most viewed real estate in your IR.
So what value do cover pages bring? As much as 5% of traffic to a Digital Commons repository comes from the active links on the cover pages, so they are a significant source of referral traffic for your repository. Want more? Google Scholar crawlers index articles with cover page pages more quickly and accurately because of well formatted and standardized bibliographic metadata: stamped cover pages help with discoverability.
As far as we are concerned, however, the greatest value of the institutionally branded cover pages is that they provide context to readers who come from Google and don’t know whether or not to “trust” this source. To illustrate this point, below is a blog post that we recently ran across, written by a scholar who found himself precisely in that situation. If you have ever wondered what a scholar thinks when she lands on your cover pages, this blog serves as an excellent proxy. Emphasis is the author’s.
“Raising visibility of repository contents for internet users”
By Pablo de CastroReposted from http://grandirblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/raising-visibility-of-repository.html
Nowadays it has become commonplace to criticize institutional repositories for their lack of content specificity: you can’t tell what version of the document is being made available, there is a lot of materials of insufficient quality in there, everything’s mixed up, etc. When one has devoted a good part of one’s professional career to develop such useful resources, this criticism is a bit painful to take. It’s true IRs have weaknesses, even lots of weaknesses, but there is quite a number of people across the world working to solve them and to improve IR content quality and description. And IRs do have a decent collection of advantages alright – that should also be acknowledged to be fair. I shall now highlight one of those advantages, incidentally not even the most important one.
This morning I was looking for some bibliography on research data management performed via institutional repositories for a report I’m currently working at. So I googled research data management institutional repositories and this is what I got:
The reference that caught my attention was of course the one with the red square around it: seems to be called Institutional Repositories and Research Data and seems to be coming from Purdue University Library in the US, although the exact source is difficult to tell from the URL there: docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?…research.
When I opened it I was simply delighted to find this “Institutional Repositories and Research Data Curation in a Distributed Environment” report by Michael Witt and I was also quite amazed to see its publication date – there are clearly several speeds out there in research data management implementation.
When trying to figure out how to cite this report I suddenly became aware of the document head: Purdue University, Purdue ePubs, Libraries research Publications, Purdue Libraries. Had this document by any chance been retrieved from an Institutional Repository? So I checked the footnote: “This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact epubs@purdue.edu for additional information”. I was simply ecstatic.
I remember having had this discussion about inserting document covers into repository contents more than once when I worked as IR manager. The arguments for not doing it were always the same: we do have too many documents in the repository by now to start re-processing them all and we should instead focus on getting even more of them filed into the IR. These are quite good arguments indeed, but it’s the kind of argument that lead to the issues we’re now bitterly complaining about. It’s a fact that IRs can be properly managed, that a great improvement in description standards has taken place and that there is a still a long way to go until we reach a consensus on a description standard that can please researchers. But not too many IRs that I know of have implemented this rather simple strategy of providing their documents a cover so that users will be able to identify their source and subsequently give it some credit. Of course there are lots of exceptions to this -if you’re in the UK or the US you will say that’s something every average repository has already cared for, see for instance this example from Enlighten repository in Glasgow or this other one from the LSE repo in London- but I’d say most IRs, even top-ranked ones, lack this small but very useful feature – since given the joint Open Access repository content figures nowadays, the repository+google/googlescholar combination is pretty much unbeatable. I would even dare to suggest some kind of harmonised international seal for identifying reliable research content coming from an institutional repository from their very cover – so that the user will be able to give credit where credit is due.
Let me finish this piece of advocacy with a recommendation to read the abovementioned Purdue University Library report to any colleague interested in potential opportunities for starting out research data management initiatives from the University Library.”
Several members of the Digital Commons community will be speaking at the upcoming Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. See links for more information.
- Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Illinois Wesleyan University, will be presenting on “Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication: Mutually Exclusive or Naturally Symbiotic?” The session convenes Thursday, April 11, 2013 8am – 9am.
- Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Illinois Wesleyan University; Isaac Gilman, Scholarly Communications and Research Services Librarian, Pacific University; and Michael Seeborg, Robert S. Eckley Distinguished Professor of Economics, Illinois Wesleyan University, will be speaking on “Library Publishing and Undergraduate Education: Strategies for Collaboration.” The session convenes Thursday, April 11, 2013 10:30am – 11:30am.
- Richard Clement, Dean of Libraries at Utah State University, Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University, and Charles Watkinson, Director and Head of Purdue Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing Services at Purdue University, will be participating in the bepress sponsored panel, “Library as Publisher: Articulating the Impact.” The session convenes on Thursday, April 11, 2013 from 3:00 – 4:30pm. To RSVP, please email events@bepress.com.
- Micah Vandegrift, Scholarly Communication Librarian, Florida State University, will be speaking on “From the Periphery into the Mainstream: Library DIY culture(s) and the academy.” The session convenes Thursday April 11 3pm – 4pm.
- Doug Way, Head of Collections and Scholarly Communications, Grand Valley State University Libraries, will be speaking on “A Data-Driven Deselection Approach for Managing Low-Use Print Materials.” The session convenes April 12, 2013 4pm – 5pm.
- Emily Asch, Head of Technical Services, St. Catherine University, will be speaking on “Not Just the Means to an End: Repositories, Marketing, and Development.” The session convenes April 13, 2013 9:45am – 10:45am.
If you would like us to share your upcoming speaking engagements, please email outreach@bepress.com.
Upcoming and Recent Speaking Engagements by Members of the Digital Commons Community: Spring 2013
Just recently, Marquette University’s Raynor Memorial Libraries hosted a Scholarly Communication Symposium where speakers including Dorothea Salo, Joyce Ogburn, and Paul Royster spoke on topics ranging from open access publishing to research data management. It turns out that other members of the Digital Commons community have also been busy organizing a variety of events and speaking engagements for the spring and summer:
- Dr. Erin Holve, Senior Director of AcademyHealth, and Beth Johnson, Senior Manager at AcademyHealth, are giving a webinar on Wednesday, April 3, 2013 from 1-2:30pm eastern on their newly launched journal, eGEMs. For more information and to register for “Publishing in eGEMs: Learning How to Learn from New Data in HSR,” see http://www.academyhealth.org/Training/ResourceDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=10673
- Jean-Gabriel Bankier, bepress, will be speaking on “Not Another Cross Search Tool: The Digital Commons Network” at the Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting (CNI) in San Antonio, Texas, Thursday April 4th, 4-5pm.
- Julian Aiken, Access Services Librarian, Yale Law School, and Hollie White, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Duke Law School, will be presenting “Institutional Repositories” at the 28th annual Computers in Libraries conference. The session convenes Monday, April 8, 2013, 2:30-3:15pm. Jim DelRosso, Digital Projects Coordinator, Cornell University, will also be presenting at this conference. His session, “Digital Repositories,” convenes Sunday, April 7, 2013, 9:00am-12:00pm.
- David Evans, Kennesaw State University; Tim Tamminga, bepress; and Jingping Zhang, Monica Brooks, Gretchen Beach, Nat DeBruin, Larry Sheret, Thomas L. Walker II, and Paris E. Webb of Marshall University will be speaking on a variety of repository-related topics at the upcoming Marshall IR Day, Thursday April 11th from 9:00am-4:45pm. For more information, see http://mds.marshall.edu/ir_day/
- Stacy Creel and Teresa Welsh of SLIS Connecting (http://aquila.usm.edu/slisconnecting/) at University of Southern Mississippi will be speaking on “Usage Data of an Open Access e-Journal in a Digital Repository” at the 17th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB) held June 13-14 2013 at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona. For more information see: http://www.bth.se/com/elpub2013.nsf/pages/preliminary-program.
If you would like us to share your upcoming speaking engagements, please email outreach@bepress.com.
Earlier this month, we held our first ever IR Manager Certification Course here at our offices in Berkeley, CA. The course was a great success, bringing together twenty IR administrators at all levels of experience from institutions across the world for two and a half days of intensive presentations and workshops. Topics ranged from basic platform features to copyright concerns to strategies for measuring and sharing IR success, and included one-on-one time for the administrators with their Consulting Services representatives. We are proud to announce our first class of graduates:
Maira Bundza, Western Michigan University
Kristi Carroll, Montana Tech
Rebecca Cremin, College of DuPage
Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Illinois Wesleyan University
Marin Dell, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University
Janet Fischer, Golden Gate University School of Law
Mary Godfrey-Rickards, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University
Rosalinda Gonzales, San Jose State University
Julia Gross, Edith Cowan University
Amanda Hartman, Longwood University
Beth Johnson, AcademyHealth
Martin Kelly, Colby College
Kristine Mudrick, St. Joseph’s University
Julia Nims, Eastern Michigan University
Ken Orenic, College of DuPage
Emily Rokisky, University of Nebraska Omaha
Ashraf Sharif, Aga Khan University
Ann St. Clair, Montana Tech
Teresa Stanton, Florida International University College of Law
Jeremy Watson, Fordham University
Congratulations, graduates!
And because the feedback from all of the attendees was so positive, we plan to offer the course again next spring, as well as an advanced certification course on developing library-based publishing programs in the fall, so stay tuned!
Feel free to contact us with any questions,
Eli Windchy, VP of Consulting Services
ewindchy@bepress.com
Ann Taylor, Director of Outreach and Scholarly Communications
ataylor@bepress.com
2013 bepress University Graduates – IR Manager Certification Course
WOU’s Straub Collection Gains State’s Recognition; Highlights Added to State’s Own Exhibit
Erin Passehl, Digital Collections Librarian and University Archivist at Western Oregon University, has created a beautiful and fascinating record of an important chapter in Oregon coastal conservation: The Robert W. Straub Oregon Beaches Collection. In fact, the State of Oregon, after discovering the images through Digital Commons@WOU, added highlights from the collection in its own web exhibit, Protecting Oregon Beaches: 1913-2013.
Erin had the daunting task of processing and digitizing a selection of materials from the university’s large collection of former Oregon Governor Robert Straub’s personal papers, photographs, video recordings, and other items (comprising 50 boxes and 40 linear feet). Fortunately, with a platform in place for collecting and publishing such diverse materials, Erin was able to focus her energy on curating a manageable selection to showcase in Digital Commons@WOU. Thinking not only as an archivist and a digital collections specialist, but also as a curator and a marketer, she focused on a topic of immediate interest and value to the local community: Oregon’s beaches and Governor Straub’s work with coastal conservation. In addition, she targeted different types of objects—including government documents, photographs, video interviews, and even a book of children’s drawings—to create a compelling user experience and appeal to a broad audience.
The result of Erin’s careful curation is a collection that is drawing a wide readership and providing researchers with an invaluable record of Oregon’s leadership in coastal conservation.
For more on special and unique collections in Digital Commons, see:
- “Capturing Unique Collections in Digital Commons: A Service to Campus and Community” (tutorial)
- “Maine Folklore Sampler Highlights State’s Rich Cultural Heritage”
If you would like to learn more about the organization and display of your own special collections in Digital Commons, please contact Consulting Services.
Robert W. Straub Oregon Beaches Collection – Western Oregon University Research – Digital Commons@WOU
