So what is Digital Commons? Tim Tamminga Bepress

First, something about bepress Started in 1999 by University of California - Berkeley faculty to publish scholarly journals. Bepress publishes over 60 scholarly journals today. In 2002 bepress and the University of California System (CDL) developed a central repository for published UC scholarly articles. This became the foundation for Digital Commons. About 180 institutions today use Digital Commons 2

Digital Commons: a full service offering Client Services Goals Free IR managers from the headaches of technically supporting users of the platform Outreach Goals Facilitate the sharing of best practices for IR success Development Goals New and improved capabilities: get content in, share it as you like, and make it visible and authoritative We do a pretty good job of explaining the advantages of our model—freeing libraries to focus on delivering services to faculty and others on campus and gathering content. Hosting and maintenance are just a small part of the Digital Commons service. We don’t just support the system. We support the users of that system.

Digital Commons as showcase Examples of Digital Commons homepages. Run PPT in Slideshow mode in order to take advantage of the links to these sites.

Examples of Digital Commons services Student scholarship Articles & reports Collections Community outreach Events publishing Scholarly publishing Institutional resources Institutionallife Digital Commons Throughout this presentation we’ll try to provide stories and examples of how the library is using Digital Commons to provide new services to researchers and departments, and how the repository can and ought to provide value to the institution and its public. As a hub of academic life, Digital Commons needs to handle a wide variety of materials. Digital Commons, as the hub, starts with the traditional uses of an IR and moves to the increasingly unusual or new types of services being provided by organizations to their internal and external stakeholders. 5

Collections Collections Digital Commons Digital Commons 6

Student Scholarship ETDs Undergraduate research Student scholarship Digital Commons Huge growth in storing and sharing student research: from undergrad research papers to doctoral students’ dissertations. The Univ of Pennsylvania’s CUREJ (“courage”) is really a growing collection of peer-reviewed undergraduate papers written in collaboration with a faculty mentor. ETDs The Texas State Student Master’s thesis is a nice example of using multi-media to showcase the document and entice the reader. The author was a teacher and coach who now works with at-risk teens. The streaming video clip presents one of his talks. The library wanted to include Collins’ video to demonstrate his speaking abilities. Students are using their works within the repository as part of their job search, as part of their portfolio. 7

Community Outreach External Internal Digital Commons Community 8

Institutional life Digital Commons Institutionallife 9 Digital Commons offers the institution and groups within that institution a way of sharing information with their communities. These example are indicative of the potential for providing news, sharing interesting or topical information, or simply providing the rest of the institution with a periodic “state of the union” address. The head of the Cal Poly Public Relations office was looking for a place to store old press releases, a need well met by Digital Commons. She then learned about the publishing capabilities and worked with with the library to include the alumni and friends of the university magazine, the Cal Poly Magazine. Then she learned that Dc could manage images, and the Office started to work with the library on storing these. Digital Commons provides a way to store back copies of the alumni magazine that can be easily searched and browsed by alumni. What makes this so exciting for the Office is that they can get hard numbers about usage and downloads. They can track where usage is coming from and use those metrics to improve their outreach to alumni and friends. The “Top of the Hill” is an example where the Colby College Library is using Digital Commons to create and disseminate a newsletter that can be shared with faculty, students, and administration. Institutionallife 9

Institutional Resources Digital Commons Cal Poly example: The Head of Cal Poly’s Facilities Department was concerned about the Department’s legacy. He wanted to ensure that the Department’s treasured and most interesting materials were preserved digitally and made public. They approached the library about Digital Commons and the result is a growing repository for these materials. This is a department that the library has never worked with before, but with the repository can now offer them valuable services. Institutional resources 10

Publishing Journals Monographs Digital Commons Scholarly publishing 11

Events Publishing: conferences Digital Commons Events publishing Events Publishing takes advantage of the publishing platform built within Digital Commons. Events Publishing is intended to support and manage content for conferences, workshops and similar types of meetings. [Note that it does not include logistics or room booking capabilities] DC has always had the ability to gather and display conference proceedings. The module can also manage future workshops and conferences. This can include a call for papers, workflows for submissions of papers or presentations, review by the conference organizers and selection of papers, and finally collect the papers after the event. A side benefit of managing these submissions within the repository is that copyright permissions can be dealt with up front during the submission process, making it far easier for the organizers and librarians to manage and make accessible those conference proceedings. 12

Articles & reports Articles and reports Digital Commons The traditional view of an IR was to store peer-reviewed articles published in the scholarly journals. The purpose of the IR is to gather that institution’s scholarship, brand it, and preserve it. 13

Doing well by doing good Serves the needs of stakeholders on campus by providing opportunities for new knowledge production Serves a key institutional mission to share / distribute its knowledge to the world Serves the business of the academy by supporting the unique facets of that institution – what makes it unique Facilitates new opportunities for knowledge production and publication Enables expansion of new library services across the academy Serving the needs of stakeholders on campus: Publishing services coupled with an IR deliver the most value when they are managed in the service of the mission and business of the university, and successfully impact scholarly life on campus by providing opportunities for new knowledge production. Serving a key university mission: Digital Commons demonstrates the function of the school within its local community, and the quality of the institution’s teaching and research output, positioning it within the global community of higher education institutions. Serving the business of the university: Specifically, the university and its administration can leverage the IR services to better position the university’s work and expertise within the global digital community. For example, Cornell’s ILR publishes and gathers a unique collection of industrial labor relations materials within its IR. How better to provide a unique voice for the institution? Impacting scholarly life on campus: the IR enables its campus constituents to use its content and services creatively. The IR serves the needs of scholars by offering new opportunities for knowledge production, thereby impacting scholarly life on campus. Over 75% of Digital Commons repositories publish journals, conference proceedings, or both, upon their first anniversary. We see this as a beneficial shift in IR scope and management as it increases the involvement of the library in the creation of scholarship on campus. The most successful and effective repositories and publishing services are those that strive to engage a diverse set of groups across campus, specifically serving both academic and non-academic units, accepting a wide scope of content, aligning repository services with the mission of the university, and facilitating new opportunities for knowledge production and publication. These libraries effectively serve the mission of the university, the business of the university, and impact scholarly life on campus, and use the IR as both tool and demonstration of their renewed role.  

Questions?

Additional Resources Presentations about Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.bepress.com/presentations/ Research about Institutional Repositories: http://works.bepress.com/ir_research/ Portal site listing institutions using Digital Commons and journals created within Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.bepress.com