1. The Development of an IR in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts College:
The Macalester College Experience
Terri Fishel
Library Director
ALA Midwinter, Philadelphia
January 13, 2008
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2. Introduction Background – Macalester College
Planning - efforts leading to IR
Selection - why DigitalCommons
Adding Content
Collaboration – key component
Current projects
Integration with Selected Works
Future
What I will cover briefly – more details can be found in our DigitalCommons via reports
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3. Background Macalester College – 1850 undergraduates, 150 FTE faculty
Early initiative was focused on digital images
ContentDM as possible solution
Limitations
No new staff
Sustainable with minimum support from IT
Integrated with other systems and services
Initiative grew out of discussions that began in 1999 to find a campus-wide solution to for storing, managing, and cataloging digital images that could be used for classroom teaching and research projects –
8 long years due to personnel changes, faculty leaving, new information technologists being hired, new technology available.
Minimum support from IT due to migration to new administrative system
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4. Planning
Digital Assets Management (DAM) working group – established 2005
Proposal to develop a digitization program – March 2005
Set of services to capture and preserve information that is formatted digitally on campus
Take advantage of new tools and publishing models
Enhance access to materials for teaching and scholarship
Means of preserving content
Enhance access to campus publications through the web using emerging tools such as Google Scholar
Pilot project to start an IR
DAM = formed under previous reporting structure when library was merged with IT
a successful partnership, after some failed attempts
Pilot project to use DigitalCommons - funding from library budget
“A Proposal for Starting a Program of Digital Assets Management at Macalester College”. Revised March 24, 2005
Pilot project based on seeing a demonstration of DC at Oberlin in 2004
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5. Selection of DigitalCommons
Annual Oberlin Meeting, San Antonio, 2004
Introduced by four private colleges; additional schools joined – led to LASR
LASR=Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository
Features
Support
Self-deposit feature
Price
Remote Hosting
Easy implementation – minimal training
Collaborative project
While we were exploring digital images management with the campus, the opportunity to use Digital Commons came along. I saw a demonstration at an Oberlin Directors meeting and could see immediate applications for managing networked access to our student honor projects – high demand, but limited access
Need for a program that was sustainable, could be integrated into existing workflows, and no new staff
saw how it could fill an immediate need to make Honors papers accessible –
at the time we did not have an archivist; we catalog our projects and we had ILL demand –
wanted to minimize requests to get into an unstaffed archives and decrease ILL burden
Price was right,, support and hosting was ideal –
DC license includes set-up, training, support, documentation, upgrades and hosting
LASR has gone onto DSpace.
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6. Planning Administrative support
Master plan
Outcomes and benefits
Open access publishing model
Priorities
Rights Management
Assessment
Start with several small projects
Administrative support – VP for Library & Information Services
Master plan developed from original proposal
Start small to integrate into existing workflow, identify needs, develop expertise
Presentation to senior staff members – Provost, Academic Dean
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7. Initial Focus Student honors projects Faculty publications
Restricted access for paper
Digitized for ILL
Wanted networked access
Faculty publications
Effort to engage faculty in scholarly communication issues
Provide a single location – showcase as well as preserve
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8. Initial Efforts Student papers Honors projects 2005
10 papers selected by departments
Geography early adopter
Honors projects 2006
31 out of 78
Honors projects 2007
36 out of 63 with 22 more when CD with digitized copies arrives
Purchased in April 2005, papers loaded in May 2005
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9. Screen capture – ability to add some customization – “organizing and sharing the creative works of the Macalester College community” – trying for something distinctive
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10. Adding Content Journals – student, peer-reviewed
Macalester Journal of Philosophy (paper editions prior to DigitalCommons)
Macalester Islam Journal
Studies in Mediterranean Antiquities & Classics
ISSNs
The first was MacJPhil. It was a print departmental journal with articles written by students.
A casual conversation between a faculty person who was a library rep started us down the journal road.
The Islam Journal came to Digital Commons because of our close collaboration with IT (Michael Nelson, AIA). Tell the story.
Michael was also instrumental in getting SMAC to be the first peer-reviewed journal in
We worked with the faculty to obtain the ISSN for the two newer journals
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11. Adding More Content Student award papers
Finding them
Getting them
DeWitt Wallace Library Reports
Strategic plan
Report on Goals for 2005
DAM master plan
Oral histories transcriptions
Faculty Publications - Scholarly Communication Issues
Janet, project manager, checks out names of students who have received awards at conferences in our campus newsletter - Bulletin.
The Bulletin, published bi-weekly electronically by College Relations, is the official campus newsletter.
Traditionally, it has carried announcements of meetings, speakers and campus-wide events, faculty and staff appearances and publications..
I have uploaded:
the library’s strategic plan for ,
the report on Goals for 2005,
and the DAM master plan.
2 oral history transcripts are ready to be loaded. We tested having audio, but have decided to focus on text only.
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12. Collaboration Administrative Departments Academic Departments
ITS and the AIAs (Instructional Technologists)
Provost
College Relations
Back/future issues of Macalester International
Current/future issues of Macalester Today
Link from Admissions/Academics page to DC
Academic Departments
Links to Digital Commons
Institute for Global Citizenship and International Studies Department
The beginnings of our IR - Digital Commons were based on collaboration.
Close collaboration with IT, key faculty, academic departments and administrative departments.
One of those admin departments is College Relations.
Our web coordinator was talking to the Director of Publications in College Relations at a meeting and she said it would be a good thing to
get the Mac International online - $1400 for back issues.
Also through College Relations, we are having Bildhaan digitized. $350.
Institute
Bildhaan
International Roundtable papers
International Studies and Programming Annual Report
Institute annual reports
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13. What we like about Digital Commons
Customizable
Paper of the day
Ten most popular downloads
Number of Full-text downloads last week
Number of Full-text downloads since the beginning
Author search
Support – especially after bepress took ownership
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14. Faculty comment
“This is an important way of sharing your insights with the broader scholarly community (and it is another way of giving back - and moving away from a model of extractive research). ”
Bill Mosley – from Janet; unsolicited support
“This is an important way of sharing your insights with the broader scholarly community
(and it is another way of giving back - and moving away from a model of extractive research). 
I really hope you will share your honors thesis in this format - in addition to the traditional paper copy.”
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15. Statistics 2005 1507 FT downloads 2006 9302 FT downloads
1507 are for Honors Projects
FT downloads
6357 are for Honors Projects
,673 FT downloads
13,592 are for Honors Projects
Where we are currently
Next development is transition to Selected Works
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16. Selected Works
Transition from Faculty/Research Publications pages www2.macalester.edu/facultypubs/
Coincided with change from Personal Pages as part of Digitalcommons
Goal – by end of January have page for each faculty person on campus
Content linked from Digital Commons, but system is also open URL
Training – liaisons, then faculty
Faculty example -
Most recent development is SelectedWorks is a web-based service that enables institutions to provide faculty with clean,
elegantly designed scholarly publication pages. Sites are custom designed to match the look
and feel of your institutional or departmental web pages and come fully supported.
We want a link to Digital Commons overall
Several sessions held for library liaisons to help faculty with Selected Works.
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17. Example – point out our current page is static, no link to content
Selected work allows us to link to content both in DigitalCommons as well as to resources for which we have subscriptions; if not available in repository can link to content you purchase [fix this]
Faculty to maintain their pages
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18. Link from this page takes directly to pdf found in Digital Commons
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19. 1/13/2008

20. Cover page from article in DigitalCommons
Cover sheet from article in DigitalCommons
Article appears in Review of Higher Education, allows deposit of articles in institutional repositories
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21. Issues/challenges/opportunities
Learning curve
Metadata guidelines
Copyright
Customization/branding of main page
Transition from ProQuest to bepress
Advisory board
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22. The Future
Content
Integration with other digital collections
Interface for Selected Works main page and link with Digital Commons
More faculty publications
Copyright – better integration of Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Use – Development; grants management using journal feature
More fully integrating these resources into our catalogs, our website, our portal, to better serve students and faculty
To also better integrate the collections that many of our consortium partners have (CLIC, Oberlin group – St. John’s East Asian art
Changing technology.
This is not the final product. But we’re happy with both Digital Commons
We also had a recent conversation with our Advancement office about a new creative use
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23. Journal as means of managing grant versions
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24. Just one example of one of the features – view revisions
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25. Conclusion In less than three years we have 85 student honor projects
3 faculty articles – open access
3 student peer-reviewed open access journals (59 total articles)
Integration into existing workflow (no new staff)
The start of a sustainable program for campus publications
Oral history transcripts coming soon
New platform for faculty research and publications
Please keep in mind, without adding staff, we have been able to make what we consider fairly good progress. We haven’t done a lot of focused marketing, because we wanted to start small
Integrate into existing workflow
And learn
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26. Additional information
Contacts:
Janet Sietmann – Project Manager; Reserve Supervisor
Terri Fishel – Library Director
Digitalcommons.macalester.edu
SelectedWorks – works.bepress.com
Janet is currently on west coast talking about our development earlier this week – some of your staff may have heard her speak at NITLE
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27. This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons license for
non-commercial educational reuse and adaptation
under a CC Attribution /Non-commercial / Share-Alike license
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