Migrating to the Open: Moving Scholarly Journals to the IR

Abstract

In the past year the University of New Hampshire School of Law Library moved three journals off of the shelves and into our repository. All three are very different in scope and format which necessitated a customized approach for each. It’s important to consider the unique attributes of each journal when setting it up in Digital Commons. For example we had publications that changed names over time, we had combined issues on some years but not on others, and we had used some inconsistent editorial practices all over the place. These all needed to be addressed before we could ingest the archive of back issues into the IR. We also had to make decisions about new editorial roles and responsibilities for upcoming issues and make sure that those decisions gelled with the process that we were using for uploading back issues. While we are still refining our metadata and are in the process of creating tutorials for our editors to use, we have seen the success of our journals in action; one was quoted in the New York Times and another one was on Forbes.com. Moving publications from print or static web pages into Digital Commons is an exciting way to boost the visibility and viability of a journal.