1. Curriculum to Commons:
Student Scholarship and Institutional Repositories
Elizabeth Skene Digitial Initiatives Librarian Western Carolina University

2. About Western Carolina University
Regional comprehensive university in the UNC system
52 miles W of Asheville, 25 miles E of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
8,821 undergraduates & 1,519 graduate students
Top contributor to the National Conference Undergraduate Research
Strong focus on teaching and undergraduate success

3. About my position Digital Initiatives Librarian Digital collections
Data management, Digital Humanities, Open Access, institutional repository, copyright, grants, community partnerships, & more!

4. WCU’s Institutional Repository
North Carolina Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship
Built and maintained by UNC Greensboro
Holds work from 8 University of North Carolina schools

5. WCU’s Institutional Repository
Traditional scholarship in NC DOCKS
Data is deposited in the UNC Odum Institute Dataverse
Oh the possibilities! DMPTool + NC DOCKS + Dataverse

6. History and Support of the IR
NC DOCKS at WCU
Developed in 2008 by UNC Greensboro
WCU joined in 2011
$200 annual fee
Indexed by Google
First item added March 11, :06pm
Initial work done by cataloging
Primarily theses and dissertations
Increasing number of faculty submissions
Increasing visibility
Still issues of marketing, awareness, and gaining broad support
Outreach to library faculty
Data management plan workshops
Open Access debate
Author rights education

8. 2 years of minimal traction
Started thinking of where we could find successes

9. Focus on Student Success
Honors College
Met with the new dean about Honors Theses
Undergraduate Research Expo
Option on submission form to add work to the IR
Graduate English class
A yearly project with letters from Special Collections

10. Annotation Digitization Digital collections
IN the past, only annotation
Since I came, DI has been digitizing
Added to collections
- Since we had them, we used the students’ transcriptions
Digital collections

11. Is there some place on that page or in the metadata that it can be noted who transcribed each item?
Digital Production Team

12. Digital Production Team
Digitization Techs
Content specialists
Catalogers
Gatekeeper
Digital Production Team

13. How do we give the students credit?
Solution Discussion
Current metadata field?
New metadata field?
“About” page?
Embed using Flickr on DH site?
Headed Discussion
Free labor
We don’t get credit
What about student workers?
Metadata standards/actual descriptive content

14. The student…holds copyright to works the student creates as a part of academic endeavor at Western Carolina University.
University Policy 84

15. Had been thinking of linking out – Wordpress site, Flickr, etc.
How about the IR?

16. Solution: 1. Use existing “Related materials” field 2
Solution: 1. Use existing “Related materials” field 2. Link to full papers in NC DOCKS
Moved discussion from credit to finding additional information
Interns, student workers, etc.

17. Able to use transcriptions
Provided users with context
Gave recognition to students
Made student work sharable
Opportunity for future projects

19. 12 papers
4 months
340+ views

20. Thoughts & takeaways Old papers = no releases = re-transcribing
Consistency in style, include an abstract
Presentation on IRs -> future scholars
You don’t have to start from scratch
Build it, then build it better
Opportunities for student success
Let faculty vet content
This was a reserve process – starting with the final product without say in how it’s formed

21. @elizabethskene emskene@wcu.edu
Thank you!