Creating an Institutional Repository

Creating an institutional repository (IR) requires much forethought and planning. Setting up a university IR committee will help direct policy and collection goals, and will encourage faculty participation. There are many things to consider in design such as branding, policy, copyright, collection development, author submissions and discoverability. Publishing in an IR requires original works, and copyright issues arise, especially if authors wish to publish in other journals. Our IR goal was to promote scholarship and encourage faculty to create publishing profile space in SelectedWorks, which can become a virtual curricula vita. The ultimate goal is discoverability and open access contribution to scholarship in the field. This article is a personal recounting of our experience in setting up FireScholars, our institutional repository at Southeastern University

Open Access Metadata for Journals in Directory of Open Access Journals: Who, How, and What Scheme?

Open access (OA) is a form of publication that allows some level of free access to scholarly publications. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a repository to which OA journals may apply and upload content to increase discoverability. OA also refers to metadata that is freely available for harvesting. In making metadata open access, standards for schemes and protocols are needed to facilitate interoperability. For open access journals, such as those listed in the DOAJ, providing open access metadata in a form that promotes interoperability is essential for discoverability of their content. This paper investigates what standards exist or are emerging, who within journals is creating the metadata for DOAJ journals, and how are those journals and DOAJ sharing the metadata for articles. Moreover, since creating metadata requires specialized knowledge of both librarians and programmers, it is imperative that journals wanting to publish with OA metadata formulate plans to coordinate these experts and to be sure their efforts are compatible with current standards and protocols

Using Google Analytics Data to Expand Discovery and Use of Digital Archival Content

This article presents opportunities for the use of Google Analytics, a popular and freely available web analytics tool, to inform decision making for digital archivists managing online digital archives content. Emphasis is placed on the analysis of Google Analytics data to increase the visibility and discoverability of content. The article describes the use of Google Analytics to support fruitful digital outreach programs, to guide metadata creation for enhancing access, and to measure user demand to aid selection for digitization. Valuable reports, features, and tools in Google Analytics are identified and the use of these tools to gather meaningful data is explained

trackr: A Framework for Enhancing Discoverability and Reproducibility of Data Visualizations and Other Artifacts in R

Research is an incremental, iterative process, with new results relying and building upon previous ones. Scientists need to find, retrieve, understand, and verify results in order to confidently extend them, even when the results are their own. We present the trackr framework for organizing, automatically annotating, discovering, and retrieving results. We identify sources of automatically extractable metadata for computational results, and we define an extensible system for organizing, annotating, and searching for results based on these and other metadata. We present an open-source implementation of these concepts for plots, computational artifacts, and woven dynamic reports generated in the R statistical computing language

Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence