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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.