Longwood University expects to launch the new Digital Commons institutional repository in February. What this means is that all works which have been created by faculty and/ or students can be easily filed and located.
Amanda Hartman, Janet D. Greenwood Library’s special collections & digital initiatives librarian, has dubbed the project as a “digital, institutional memory” for the school.
Hartman is the project manager and has been posting blogs about the progress of the project, which can be viewed on the Longwood blog site under the department’s tab labeled as “Digital Commons.”
Hartman wrote that the hope is to bring all of the school’s archives together under one umbrella. In one of her posts, Hartman said the Digital Commons will “aim to preserve and provide access to that research.”
Suzy Palmer, dean of the library, said, “The Digital Commons will give our faculty and students a place to have their scholarly works preserved and accessible to anyone with Internet access. This will not only enhance the visibility of the individuals' works, but also of Longwood University.”
There are even talks of adding class materials such as lecture and presentation notes later in the development of the program.
Hartman said, “There will be ‘elements’ available hopefully next month.” The project does not expect to receive a formal unveiling. Hartman said if indeed the Digital Commons were to be launched in February, “It would be the live version; it’s just going to be one of those organic things that will continue to grow as we add material to it.”
Initially, the Digital Commons will contain yearbooks from the university’s history. There are also plans to collect articles and other scholarly works from the university’s professors. There will, however, be no material with copyright restrictions, so all of the material on the site will be all open source.
In one of Hartman’s blog posts, she said, “At no point does the Greenwood Library assume ownership of any of the material housed in the repository; we simply are providing convenient access and enhanced longevity of materials deemed of interest to Longwood and the Longwood community.”
The library has been pondering the idea of a Digital Commons for a few years now. The university wanted to add a program of this type to its repertoire because other schools, such as the University of Nebraska, Connecticut, Utah and even Liberty University, have also started or have already established their own versions.
The school has acquired the necessary resources from Bepress with extra, end-of-year funds in spring of 2012. While the library will be doing most to all of the content building, the system itself will be hosted and programmed off-site by Bepress.
Bepress is a company dedicated to the linking and sharing of scholarly information. Their official statement on their webpage states, “Through our services bepress seeks to link communities of scholars, listen to their needs and provide solutions to support emerging academic missions and goals.”
The Bepress site has already helped other schools with their own Digital Commons. Their site shows links and images from the Digital Commons of schools such as the University of Tennessee, Utah State and even Yale Law School.
The hope is that this will simplify the search process of Longwood University- related materials. Where before it may take hours of extensive research to find material, it will now become a much faster and easier process, according to both Hartman and Palmer.
Longwood University anticipates that this will not only be something accessible to students and faculty, but also to connect other scholars.
The entire goal of Digital Commons is to share information between academic institutions to further build upon their information database.
