Digital Preservation and Access of Natural Resources Documents

Digitization and preservation of natural resource documents were reviewed and the current status of digitization presented for a North American university. It is important to present the status of the digitation process for natural resources and to advocate for increased collections of digital material for ease of reference and exchange of information. Digital collections need to include both published documents and ancillary material for research projects and data for future use and interpretation. The methods in this paper can be applied to other natural resource collections increasing their use and distribution. The process of decision making for documents and their preservation and inclusion in ScholarWorks is presented as a part of the Forest Sciences Commons as a subset of the Life Sciences Commons of the Digital Commons Open Network launched and maintained by bepress. Digitization has increased the roles and skillsets needed for librarians and from libraries. This creates new challenges and opportunities for the library as publisher and as an advocate for open access. Digital curation melds together digitization and knowledge management and enhances community engagement. Digitization of collections are reviewed and natural resource documentation presented for faculty publications, Research Projects and Centers, eBooks, Journals, Galleries and electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Recommendations are made to increase the digital curation of the collection by encouraging community participation and use. Digital archives are important to natural resource professionals as society-ready natural resource graduates need to deal effectively with complex ecological, economic and social issues of current natural resources management. Natural resource research for the future needs to ensure that professionals have a greater breath of knowledge as they interpret and apply new knowledge, understanding, and technology to complex, transdisciplinary social and biological issues and challenges

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways."--P. [4] of cove

Smoothing the Transition to Mandatory Electronic Theses

After a year of voluntary submissions, Caltech is requiring electronic thesis submission for all graduate students effective July 1, 2002. Website development, user education, collaboration between library and campus computing staff, and with faculty and the dean's office are all integral to the transition

Guide to Options for ETD Programs

Dr. Martin Halbert of the University of North Texas documents the spectrum of ETD program implementation and offers guidance for academic decision-makers who are either creating or modifying ETD programs. Dr. Halbert identifies and offers in-depth analysis regarding the five key decisions that ETD programs must make. He also provides a literature review of publications, standards and reports that have been produced to date, and relates these to the key decisions

Illinois Digital Scholarship: Preserving and Accessing the Digital Past, Present, and Future

Since the University's establishment in 1867, its scholarly output has been issued primarily in print, and the University Library and Archives have been readily able to collect, preserve, and to provide access to that output. Today, technological, economic, political and social forces are buffeting all means of scholarly communication. Scholars, academic institutions and publishers are engaged in debate about the impact of digital scholarship and open access publishing on the promotion and tenure process. The upsurge in digital scholarship affects many aspects of the academic enterprise, including how we record, evaluate, preserve, organize and disseminate scholarly work. The result has left the Library with no ready means by which to archive digitally produced publications, reports, presentations, and learning objects, much of which cannot be adequately represented in print form. In this incredibly fluid environment of digital scholarship, the critical question of how we will collect, preserve, and manage access to this important part of the University scholarly record demands a rational and forward-looking plan - one that includes perspectives from diverse scholarly disciplines, incorporates significant research breakthroughs in information science and computer science, and makes effective projections for future integration within the Library and computing services as a part of the campus infrastructure.Prepared jointly by the University of Illinois Library and CITES at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig

The IR has Two Faces: Positioning Institutional Repositories for Success

This article will describe ongoing efforts at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries to evolve the role of the institutional repository (IR) and to effectively position it within the context of the Libraries’ collections, research support, and scholarly communication services. A major component of this process is re-examining the fundamental aims of the IR and aligning it to the Libraries and the campus strategic goals. The authors situate UNLV Libraries’ experience within the context of the current literature to provide background and reasoning for our decision to pursue two, at times conflicting, aims for the IR: one for scholarly communication and another for research administration

Evaluating Institutional Repositories’ (IR) capabilities for long-term preservation with a focus on content, file format and metadata practices in selected public university libraries in Kenya

The type of content and file format influences the success of digital preservation strategies. Institutional repositories are custodians of digital resources that are to be held in perpetuity necessitating the need to consider long term preservation of these resources. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the suitability of digital content and its metadata for long term digital preservation. The study was qualitative in nature utilizing interviews as well as document analysis. websites and IR database investigations were utilized to check on content, format and metadata adequacy. The findings revealed great inadequacies in the IRs’ capabilities to support long term preservation as evidenced by haphazard content and format selection, ingest procedures that did not consider long-term preservation as well as metadata that focused on access only. Recommendations included the need to involve archivist in develop selection and appraisal policies as well as development comprehensive metadata policies that ensured that preservation metadata was also captured as required. Creation of awareness among repository administrators to expose them to the importance of adopting open file formats and standard as well as benchmarking were also proposed. The paper provides insights into universities on the relationship between selection and processing of digital resources and their long-term preservation within the IRs in Kenya

The Role of Institutional Repositories in Advancing Open Scholarship: A Case Study from the United Arab Emirates University

The digitization of theses and dissertations at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) began five years ago with the Digital Commons institutional repository (IR) platform, Scholarworks, employed for the purpose. The project, initiated by the University Library, exemplifies how academic libraries can take the lead in advocating for digital preservation and open access publishing of institutional research materials. This case study describes how the library’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) initiative has provided an excellent model to the UAEU for it to start disseminating its research output and how the library’s copyright and open access policies have been crucial for the project’s success. We summarize the UAEU’s IR objectives, including future expansion of publication types beyond the current ETD and journal collections. We identified opportunities for improvements to the repository, such as enhanced workflows, librarians’ capabilities, system performance, and increased discoverability and metadata. Our study highlights the successes and technical challenges of developing the UAEU IR and its central role in supporting open scholarship at the university

Towards the establishment and implementation of an institutional repository at the University of Cape Town (UCT): a case study

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.The concepts of open access and scholarly publishing are still gaining momentum in Africa, especially South Africa. Increasingly, institutional repositories are being planned and developed by universities throughout the world especially in the first world countries, which have taken the lead. Institutional repositories have developed because of changes in scholarly communication where journal prices are high and libraries are finding it difficult to subscribe to them. Communication technology in the form of the internet brought a solution to the problem. Researchers, authors and libraries now advocate for the open access model of scholarly communication. This study explores the developments associated with the establishment and implementation of an Institutional Repository at UCT

espida Bibliography

This is the bibliography pulled together during research for the espida Project