ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY

A group of librarians from New England collaborated to organize the first-ever Northeast Institutional Repository Day (NIRD) on June 18, 2019. The fourth annual NIRD was held virtually on December 1-2, 2022. The goal of NIRD is to bring together all in the Northeast (and beyond) who manage or are interested in institutional repositories, digital collections, and digital preservation. We are platform agnostic. This site is a repository of conference materials and is hosted by the Lamar Soutter Library at UMass Chan Medical School.

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Collections in this community

Recently Published

  • Remediating Faculty Scholarship for Accessibility: An Approach with Microsoft Word Docs as Supplemental Files

    Aghazarian, Maria; Jiang, Connie (2022-12-02)
    This presentation will cover our approach to accessibility for our institutional repository of faculty scholarship. Accessibility is a legal, moral, and ethical commitment for both our researchers and the readers of their research. Our IR includes Swarthmore-affiliated research by faculty and staff, including emeriti, with about one-third of the citations providing full text access to PDFs. These PDFs range from preprints to version of record, with some holding Creative Commons licenses and others scanned from print and posted with the written permission of publishers. This leaves us with a collection of widely varied documents with regards to scan quality and base accessibility. Our previous approach to accessibility involved remediating PDFs in Adobe Acrobat, which presented a variety of issues. It was difficult to ensure the accuracy of OCR processing, particularly for: documents in non-Roman languages; images and figures incorrectly processed as text; older scanned documents from archival sources; and scans of works from our collection with marginalia. Furthermore, if a document needed a correction after it was initially processed, we often needed to reprocess the entire document rather than being able to make a simple correction. Building on the work of our College’s Accessibility Working Group, we decided to take a new approach by creating accessible Word documents to live alongside our PDFs in our repository. Our presentation will cover how we display these accessible documents and cross-link them to our posted PDFs, as well as how this new workflow addresses the aforementioned issues that we weren’t able to remediate in our previous process. We will provide a range of examples from our work, including the documentation we created to address situations such as: what we do when we find typos in the original publications; navigating internal references to page numbers; and handling documents that use aesthetic formatting decisions rather than best practices for accessibility.
  • Long Term Interdisciplinary Research Collections in Digital Commons

    Chace, Jameson F; Emsellem, Dawn; Iglesias, Edward (2022-12-02)
    Salve Regina University and McKillop library maintain an instance of Digital Commons as an Institutional Repository. Historically this repository has been used for housing student work such as theses and dissertations as well as Special Collections and Archives. Formats vary from pure text to images and sound. Recently the library was approached by faculty seeking to create an interdisciplinary collection focused on the Islands of Narraganset Bay. This is part of an ongoing multiyear project that involves students in Biology, Education and History researching these islands. The results will be housed in the Institutional Repository. The creation of this collection posed some challenges in organization since: the contributors would come from a variety of disciplines rather than being organized by class or department; the data would be in a variety of formats from text to audio visual; the metadata would be entered in by students rather than library staff. Discussion will focus on some of the challenges and opportunities of presenting findings in a variety of formats including audiovisual, data centric and images. Dr. Chace will focus on recruiting and training students from a variety of disciplines while Director Emsellem will discuss some of the challenges of integrating this ongoing project into our library including commitments of time and resources as well as organizational challenges. Finally Edward Iglesias will discuss the technical challenges involved with organization and display of such a collection including the use of Digital Commons Exhibits as a way of combining resources from disparate disciplines in a variety of formats.
  • Red Hawks Soar!: Showcasing our Unique Collections to Engage the University Community and Beyond

    Ramsden, Karen; Sweeper, Darren (2022-12-02)
    The purpose of our presentation is to share our experiences in building relationships in order to create several unique and socially relevant collections in the Montclair State University Digital Commons. We will discuss issues related to community engagement, outreach and librarian liaison work undertaken to form new partnerships. During this process we learned how to adapt to change and how to find new ways to innovate, create and collaborate in order to demonstrate the value of the library, while promoting faculty research and our students scholarly activities, in support of the Strategic Plan of the University. In our presentation, we will discuss how we created Personas from the results of our research study to identify faculty members to use as a guide when evaluating services and outreach. We will address the process of promoting the repository to the campus community at large, and everything in between from the planning stages to the continued growth and sustainability of the repository. As this evolving culture of research is embraced throughout the University, the need for a vibrant, adaptable, and creative use of the repository becomes just as crucial as an IR’s archival capabilities, especially when impacting the University’s strategic vision and mission.
  • JavaScript as Your Assistant: How to Populate Batch Spreadsheets FAST using CrossRef API

    Hlasten, Yuimi; Do, Thanh (2022-12-02)
    Have you ever felt that Excel spreadsheets and OpenRefine are not helpful anymore? Your metadata cleaning project is so messy, so complicated, and there isn’t a single tool out there to help you? Maybe what you really need is not a better tool, but something that is programmed to act like you? My presentation shares instructions and insights about how to program with Google Apps Script, CrossRef API, and OpenAlex API, so that Google Spreadsheets fills out on its own, if you provide DOIs. You don’t need programming knowledge, but access to Google Spreadsheet is necessary in order to use the source code I will share. At Denison, we archive faculty papers in Denison Digital Commons. To populate this collection, we use Google Spreadsheet with Google Apps Script that fetches metadata from CrossRef API. The custom source code in Google Apps Script finds a faculty paper if the paper has a DOI number. Then it fills out the spreadsheet. Here’s a quick demonstration that shows how the spreadsheet works: https://www.loom.com/share/71e4556f265145d0b3ac77337f2f38c1. CrossRef API and Open Alex API do similar things, but the data they offer and the way they offer are slightly different. We will also look at the differences and similarities, pros and cons between them.
  • Climate Justice and Racial and Gender Equity: Creating and Promoting Featured Collections

    Buchanan, Sherry (2022-12-01)
    PDXScholar, the repository for Portland State University, showcases three main collections that are automatically curated based on filters – tags that collect and display the content: Climate Justice, Racial and Gender Equity, and COVID-19. In this presentation, I will give an overview of our featured collections, their development and promotion, including the criteria for inclusion, technical aspects, and impact. The Digital Commons automated collection tool and system configuration will be briefly explained.
  • The creation of an institutional repository migration checklist

    Kraus, Joseph R.; Baker, Christine (2022-12-01)
    Colorado School of Mines recently migrated from a consortial DSpace repository which was managed by a member library, to a commercial hosted DSpace repository, now called the Mines Repository. The presenters received administrative privileges in the new repository, and this added to the migration learning curve. The new repository host provided documentation and several communication channels concerning the migration. However, the library was not given an easy-to-read and follow checklist of action items as the migration moved forward. After searching the literature, not many articles were found to include a desired migration checklist related to repositories. As the presenters learned more about administering the new repository, they created a basic checklist to keep track of the moving parts of the migration process. For example, they wanted to be sure that digitized items and associated metadata migrated correctly. They also worked to ensure that hyperlinks, search features, specific administrative actions (e.g. editing records, creating collections), and integrations (e.g. SSO, DOIs) were progressing and working as expected. This checklist served as a visual reminder, showing what had been accomplished as well as items and processes that still required attention. The checklist was intended to be a living document; members of the Mines Repository Working Group were encouraged to add items to the list and to participate in testing. It is meant to be platform agnostic, and this could be adapted by other organizations considering a repository migration. We plan to show the major components of the checklist, and to request feedback from conference attendees.
  • U.S. Repository Network: Moving from Vision to Action

    Baich, Tina (2022-12-01)
    The U.S. Repository Network is an initiative of SPARC with support from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). In its “Modernizing the Global Repository Network Initiative,” COAR identified the need for assistance in breaking down institutional silos and developing a more cohesive approach and greater collaboration around repositories in the U.S. Through a Visiting Program Officer, SPARC engaged an expert group of library/repository professionals as well as the broader U.S. repository community to develop a strategic vision for U.S. repositories. The strategic vision is “an interoperable network of repositories is an essential component of our national research infrastructure, offering rapid and open access to research, and plays a crucial role in collective efforts to transform global research communications, leading to a more open, inclusive, and equitable system.” This strategic vision and its complimentary foundational characteristics guide the U.S. Repository Network (USRN) Action Plan, which is structured to advance the vision and to ensure the ongoing engagement and sustainability of the network. The presenter will briefly describe the vision development process, review the strategic vision itself, and discuss the current status of the action plan. The USRN is intended to be inclusive of all U.S. repositories, and the presenter will also discuss potential avenues for future engagement.
  • It gets worse before it gets better: The promises and pitfalls of automating IR workflows

    Lovett, Julia (2022-12-01)
    What are the pros and cons of automating IR workflows? In the past few years, we have increasingly used batch processes and automation to manage IR content. On the positive side, these changes have saved time and increased accuracy. There have been opportunities to gain new skills and forge new partnerships. On the other hand, we learned that when you’re doing batch processes, the stakes are higher for getting it right! I will discuss three examples of where this transition involved growing pains and sometimes visible missteps, but paid off in the long run: transferring ETD's from ProQuest to the IR; registering new DOI's in Crossref and adding them to the IR; and, harvesting faculty article metadata from Scopus to the IR for our Open Access Policy. I will also briefly share the workflows themselves, touching on using OpenRefine and collaborating with IT.
  • Zotero: Low-budget, high-power middleware for electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repository workflows

    Jackson, Esther; Pope, Kathryn; Mercurio, Jeremiah (2022-12-01)
    Zotero is powerful, free, and open source software that can be used to manage bibliographic collections. Traditionally, users leverage Zotero to manage their personal research collections, or use group libraries to share resources with their collaborators. As a part of its openness, Zotero supports import and export of metadata in no fewer than 15 formats. This flexibility, as well as paid features that allow for multiple users to contribute to shared Group Libraries of large or even unlimited sizes, make it well-suited for collaboratively preparing bulk deposits for repositories. Using a Zotero Lab License, Digital Scholarship staff at the Columbia University Libraries (CUL) have designed a novel workflow that allows partners across campus to submit batches of thesis and/or dissertation metadata and PDFs for deposit in Academic Commons, our institutional repository. This process is structured, but moderately complex, and relies on knowledge of Google Sheets, csv, RIS, python, OpenRefine, and, of course, Zotero. We have piloted this workflow with one partner, and plan to use it to manage additional ETD deposit workflows, including a trial with the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for all doctoral dissertations. In this lightning talk we plan to outline the workflow we developed, give a brief report of partner feedback thus far, and speak to our opinions about the long-term viability of this solution.
  • IR Management: Handling the Hard Cases

    Walker, Wendy (2022-12-01)
    Administering an institutional repository (IR) can be challenging. Aside from common but nuanced tasks such as explaining the difference between a publisher's PDF and a post-print or establishing ingest workflows for different kinds of content, IR administrators sometimes encounter situations that push at IR policy, call into question fundamental assumptions about the benefits of Open Access, or complicate the relationship among searchability, access, and an item's authenticity. When these situations arise, it is tempting to seek guidance from trusted sources; however, privacy concerns and other details specific to these requests can make it difficult or even impossible to discuss them with other IR administrators and colleagues or to find adequate help in the literature. These situations can leave one feeling professionally isolated and uncertain. In an effort to help provide some relief and bring awareness to the ubiquity of challenging IR requests and the kinds of careful consideration that they require, I will share some of the hard cases that I have encountered as an IR administrator, how I have handled them, and lessons learned.
  • MBLWHOI Library’s Institutional Repository – WHOAS: DSpace 7.2 migration

    Roth, Debbie; Mickle, Audrey (2022-12-01)
    The MBLWHOI Library’s Institutional Repository (IR) is a DSpace repository. We are migrating from version 5.6 to 7.2. This presentation will demonstrate new DSpace 7 features in our repository, while discussing our story and our takeaways from our migration.
  • Chinese American Librarians Association and the CALASYS: An Institutional Repository Celebrating CALA 50th Anniversary

    Pun, Ray; Deng, Sai; Chen, Suzhen; Liu, Weiling; Ma, Xiaoli (2022-12-01)
    As the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA)’s Institutional Repository, CALASYS hosts scholarly works and educational materials from its members and library professionals in the Library and Information Science field, and it also archives CALA’s official documents, conference materials, and Chinese cultural heritage collections. Currently, over 600 items have been added to CALASYS’ open and private collections. In celebration of the CALA’s 50th Anniversary, the CALA 50th Celebration Taskforce and the CALASYS Committee created a collection grant which aimed to preserve the history of CALA, Chinese American librarians, and the Chinese American community, encourage CALA members’ participation in CALASYS and enrich its collections. Three proposed collections have been awarded or recognized including CALA: A Path to the Future Library Leaders, CALA/YALSA Chinese American Reading List and Ming Qing Women's Poetry Collection. Open trainings have been designed and delivered to the grant participants and efforts have been made to collect data and build data models for deposit of these collections. This presentation will address the Omeka-based CALASYS system, its scope and collection policy, content and collections especially the awarded collections, the self-contribution and mediated contribution workflows and share some metadata and record examples. By opening CALASYS to all, the CALA President and officers hope that each contributing individual, committee, and chapter will be able to deposit works and documents and become the manager of their own collections after going through additional training. CALASYS will thus continue to grow at a faster pace and in a more inclusive direction in promoting diverse scholarships and research as well as association history.
  • Choose IR Own Adventure: Re-examining the Purpose and Mission of our Institutional Repository

    Hersey, Denise; Silkotch, Christie; Burns, Chris; O'Malley, Donna L.; Ross, Lyman (2021-12-02)
    For years, libraries have been involved in the development and management of campus institutional repositories (IRs). The purpose of these IRs varies but it is often to provide a platform for collecting and making freely available the scholarly output of the university or college. Depending on the breadth of materials and campus constituencies represented in the IR, library staff often spend many hours managing this resource. Given the proliferation of online platforms for sharing scholarly works, is this time worth the effort, or can it be diverted into new and possibly more relevant projects? The Library system at the University of Vermont began supporting the University’s IR in 2007, and is currently licensing BePress from Elsevier as the platform. Library staff have recently begun to reevaluate the viability of continuing to support the IR in its current form. In order to determine the future of the library’s involvement in the IR, a working group of librarians has been systematically reexamining the purpose and mission of UVM’s IR, the platform on which to house it, the type of content to include, and the staffing model needed to sustain it. This group hopes to align the mission and management structure of institutional repository services with the library’s strategic plan and the university’s strategic vision. We will share the process by which we engaged in this work, and the changes we plan to recommend as a result.
  • Wrangling Horses and Herding Cats: ETDs and Other Terminal Projects (OTPs)

    Swicord, G. W. (2021-12-02)
    The nature of graduate student works has evolved in response to technological and academic changes. At the University of Florida, the Libraries work closely with the Graduate School to make terminal works available through the Institutional Repository (IR@UF). This presentation discusses the Libraries decision to establish Terminal Projects (TPs) as a category used to encompass traditional electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and other terminal projects (OTPs) that are required to complete a graduate degree at UF. To open discussion, I will compare and contrast UF's Graduate School output with graduate TPs from other colleges, schools, and departments. I will cover some structural factors at UF that led to the need for a super-category, encompassing ETDs and other projects at UF required to complete a graduate degree. Records analysis will test the hypothesis that the ratio of OTPs to TPs is growing. I will cover the challenges of looking for stats on a subject not built into any of the available data sources: our main catalog, metadata from the IR@UF, email, production folders, and a Microsoft Access tracking database. The rest of the discussion covers the current effort to standardize and streamline intake and tracking of OTPs. The tracking database grew from work on an Excel template intended to gather tracking data from the degree granting units (DGUs). This work inspired a new goal: working with DGUs to identify keywords or notes that would support global searches for their students' works. Adding such consistent terms can enable us to import data into the bibliographic records created by our cataloging unit, and export the same information to include in the tracking sy]stem. Having data points like author names, titles, degrees, and DGUs in the tracking system will enable smoother, more personalized support for authors and DGU staff.
  • Dueling Repository Woes: Greater Needs, Fewer In-House Experts

    Paquette, Michelle; Menchen, Sadie (2021-12-02)
    This session will serve as a brief case study of how one college special collections unit navigated a particularly transitional year in which they faced an unparalleled increase in demand for digital collections access alongside a reduction of in-house technical support for their digital repository. As at other institutions, the COVID-19 pandemic majorly impacted the operations of Smith College Special Collections (SCSC), with a switch to remote teaching, cancelled fellowship visits, and physical collections that were suddenly inaccessible. To provide the remote access to archives and special collections needed to facilitate teaching and research, SCSC spun up a digitization-on-demand workflow. Using a pseudo “assembly line” model, SCSC digitized over 70,000 pages of material from over 1200 digitization requests between August 2020 and July 2021.
  • IR Outreach: Reaching Beyond the Regular

    Gruwell, Cindy (2021-12-02)
    Marketing our Argo IRCommons is no easy task. Though it has existed for almost a decade, its growth and progress has been stunted by the lack of consistent coordination and management. With a new manager and coordinator on board it was time to make changes that would foster new collections and faculty submissions in order to showcase the robust research of the university. In collaboration with the Argo IRCommons Manager we pulled together an aggressive approach to marketing and outreach that would include informing faculty about the IRCommons, proactively requesting recently published works, and bringing students into the conversation. In addition we would pay close attention to the inclusion of underrepresented POC, women in STEM,and non-traditional students wherever and whenever possible. Join me and learn more about our journey.
  • Increasing material and department diversity in the institutional repository: Outreach to art faculty and students

    Baribeau, Hilary (2021-12-02)
    Institutional repositories began as and continue to be repositories designed to primarily support text-based materials. However, the importance of supporting diverse collections and of showcasing the wide range of materials, works, and outputs across an academic institution necessitates the inclusion of non-textual materials and the development of outreach techniques to researchers and faculty members who produce work that is often difficult to collect and catalog. The Art Department at Colby College, a small, private liberal arts college in Maine, only represents 2.8% of the total faculty and student materials in the repository systems at Colby College, which include Digital Commons and JSTOR Forum. However, many of the faculty members are exhibiting artists. Students who participate in the Studio Art and in the Art History program create and showcase materials during their Senior Capstone that have been so far been underrepresented in the institutional collections. In the Spring of 2021, a new position was created at Colby College for a Scholarly Communications Librarian to further develop Colby College Libraries’ digital collections and to support the research and intellectual work of Colby Students and faculty. As part of this work, the new Scholarly Communications Librarian started to work with both the studio capstone program and an art faculty member to better capture, describe, and showcase their work. This is part of a wider goal to increase both material and departmental representation in the Colby College repository spaces, assess the pressure points and growth opportunities for the current repository infrastructures, and to increase the visibility of open access initiatives on campus. This presentation will discuss the work that has been done so far, specifically highlighting copyright and digital rights management considerations when working with artists, the lessons learned, and will conclude with an open discussion of the goals for further developing this initiative.
  • Turn and Face the Strange (DAMS Changes): Temporarily Migrating Digital Collections into an Institutional Repository

    Exline, Eleta; Colbert, Jay (2021-12-02)
    Like many libraries, our library operates two repository systems - an Institutional Repository (IR) for scholarship and university publications and a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) for digitized library collections. Faced with the need to migrate out of our aging DAMS with no replacement system yet chosen, we wondered if the IR could serve as a transient home for our digitized collections while we solidified other plans. What compromises would we need to make in order to carry through with this plan? What might we learn about these collections by bringing them together in one location? What steps could we take to ensure a successful migration? In this presentation we will discuss our temporary migration and the lessons we learned along the way. Topics will include the overlapping aims of IRs and DAMS as content repositories, the functional and metadata requirements of different types of digital content, stop gap measures we used to support missing functions, and how our experience is informing our selection and migration to a new DAMS.
  • Digital Repository Legacies: A Case Study in Assessing Organizational Trustworthiness

    Reijerkerk, Dana; Nyitray, Kristen J. (2021-12-02)
    Academic libraries rarely discuss cases of digital repositories that do not meet the standards expected of trusted digital repositories. Implications from inconsistent adherence to technical and professional criteria often surface during migration projects. In 2020, Stony Brook University Libraries began migrating assets to a mono-repository environment. Persistent historical factors presented challenges to repository trustworthiness. This case study discusses a survey project to evaluate legacy repository statuses in the contexts of infrastructure, documentation, and staff capacity. It considers a paradigm of organizational accountability in digital asset stewardship and offers insights for reconciling inherited legacies with aspirations to be a trusted repository.
  • Technical Reports in the Repository: Syncing a unique grey literature collection in multiple library systems

    Jackson, Esther M.; Bielskas, Amanda S.; Holmes, Emily; Wacker, Melanie (2021-12-02)
    Academic Commons is the digital repository of Columbia University and its affiliated institutions. Currently over 32,000 works are accessible through this portal. However, finding new ways to add unique collections and their metadata to the institutional repository (IR) is a constant challenge. One of those unique collections are the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory Technical Reports, a set of scientific geoscience reports dating from 1949 to 2003. A cross-departmental team at Columbia University Libraries set out to digitize 298 of these technical papers comprising 32,597 pages and including 151 foldouts of various sizes. Metadata was already largely available through WorldCat and for this reason a workflow was devised that enabled the team to reuse that existing MARC metadata from OCLC WordCat and at the same time increase access and visibility of these resources by making them digitally available through WorldCat, HathiTrust, CLIO, (Columbia’s local integrated library system (ILS)), Internet Archive, and Academic Commons (the IR). This new workflow involves digitization of the original print reports, cataloging of the physical and digital copies, dynamically cross-walking (via HySync, an internal application) the MARC metadata from the ILS to a MODS-based format in Academic Commons, where the reports were assigned DOIs and made available for download. Since the collection was made available in the IR in September of 2020, the items have been viewed over 6,000 times and downloaded nearly 3,000 times. This presentation will outline the individual steps comprising the new workflow, from selection over digitization and cataloging to discovery, the benefits enabled by this collaboration across departmental lines, but also address the challenges encountered along the way.

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