EDITOR'S NOTES
Making Repositories Work
by Dick Kaser
As Senovia Guevara observes in her article about the Digital Commons at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), “Online institutional repositories … are becoming less of a novelty and more of a fixture in institutions of higher education.” EMU, as she reports, belongs to a group of nearly 400 other colleges and universities on the bepress network.
Such digital repositories—which gather the collective work of a school’s researchers, teachers, and students and make them openly accessible on the internet—are dependent, like most library systems, on metadata.
Tom Adamich, who has been studying metadata architectures for several decades, takes you on a tour of platforms that use persistent identifiers to accurately and thoroughly compile a scholar’s published works and datasets into searchable collections.
But what if some of the author’s works are not available as OA documents? Using Elsevier APIs, Todd Digby and Robert Philips (University of Florida) were able to expand the number of published articles discoverable and retrievable through the university’s institutional repository, even if the user resides at another college. And when all else fails, they can now provide a final manuscript.
While some still fret about what to do with the research datasets they are increasingly expected to house, librarians at Rush Rhees Library (University of Rochester) show—with their case study about gate traffic—that data is something to be embraced. They applied Big Data analytic techniques to the data gathered from multiple sensors in their library to better understand how the library space is used.
Finally, EDTECH readers, I have a treat for you this month. Just back from the Consumer Electronics Show, Brian Pichman shares his picks for the hottest new educational robots, storytime gadgets, and AR/VR devices to pump up your library media center.
See you at the makerspace.
Dick Kaser, Executive Editor
kaser@infotoday.com
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