SPEC Kit 341: Digital Collections Assessment and Outreach · 23
There is not a policy for the assessment and evaluation of the institutional repository (IR). However, the number of
records and download statistics are documented monthly to evaluate the growth of the IR. The Ranking Web of
Repositories is also used as one of the indicators of the performance of the IR. Content in the IR is promoted through
social media, listservs, and the university online news. If a particular collection is tied to a campus initiative, e.g.,
Passport to the World, it will be mentioned in the publicity materials for the initiative.
We currently do outreach through social media, instruction, and exhibits, but do not have these policies or workflows
documented. We are not actively doing assessment and evaluation of our digital library but hope to in the next year.
We did a review of the platforms delivering our digital collection content in 2010. From this review, we confirmed that
we needed to migrate e-journal content from a moribund platform to a different one. We also determined that we
needed to be thinking more programmatically about digital preservation across all our platforms. For this reason and
a variety of others (including web accessibility issues and user and content issues), we will likely be continuing with
migration of other content in the next few years.
We have current local practices adopted based on the collection type and the unit in charge of it. Over the next several
years, we will formalize standards, requirements, and knowledge sharing. However, our eThesis repository does have a
formal policy and process.
We have informal policies and guidelines.
We use Google Analytics as much as possible to generate metrics, and plan to make this uniform, and expand the
activity, over the next few years.
While we are not long in policies, we do indeed follow international standards for digitization and have informal
checklists for assessment, evaluation, and outreach of our collections.
With few exceptions, our digital projects have been initiated from outside the unit: internal to the library often from
Special Collections, and external to the library from faculty members. While we have criteria regarding what projects
we will support (assisting in the creation of a digital resource) they do not extend to those of traditional collection
development policies of print collections. Our digitization and digital project development functions more in several
respects as a service vs. a collection. We have a document (which will not be shared as it’s in need of updating)
outlining support for digital projects, and we have informal ongoing assessment and outreach, but it is typically project-
by-process, rather than formal overarching policy.
2. Which of the following technology platforms does your library use to provide access to your locally
curated digital collections? Check all that apply. N=69
DSpace 34 49%
Omeka 30 44%
ContentDM 22 32%
Fedora 22 32%
BePress DigitalCommons 16 23%
Hydra 12 17%
Islandora 9 13%
DigiTool 2 3%
Greenstone 1 1%
SobekCM 1 1%
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