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DigitalCommons@ILR: Beyond the Traditional Institutional Repository

Mary Newhart and Suzanne Cohen

 

In 2004 the Catherwood Library and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) launched a subject-based institutional repository, DigitalCommons@ILR. While including documents found in a traditional institutional repository (articles, chapters, conference proceedings, working papers, and other intellectual output of the school), we also wanted DigitalCommons@ILR to capture born-digital and grey literature that we collect on the subject of industrial and labor relations.  With strong support of the ILR deans and ILR Web Studios, plus reassignment of staff responsibilities within the Catherwood Library, we have been able to grow our repository. 

Partnerships, both inside and outside ILR, have been crucial to our collection development efforts.  Working with the editors of the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, DigitalCommons@ILR is now home to this scholarly journal.  The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress), the developer of the Digital Commons institutional repository platform, was able to offer a customized design that matched the Industrial and Labor Relations Review’s current Web site and also provided gated subscription-only access to articles eighteen months or newer and open access for older documents and all book reviews.  We are partnering with Cornell University Press to provide the abstract, table of contents, and first twenty-five pages of its ILR Press titles with a link back to the Cornell University Press Web site.  In exchange, we have permission to post ILR Press book chapters authored by ILR faculty in our repository.  Another partnership example is the one with the Global Applied Disability Research and Information Network (GLADNET), which is itself a partner of ILR’s Employment and Disability Institute.   DigitalCommons@ILR has a GLADNET collection of documents that include reports, government documents, and project descriptions relating to employment and training for people with disabilities. The Key Workplace Documents and the Globalization Collection are examples of the born-digital or grey literature referred to earlier, for which we were required to negotiate and partner with various individuals, agencies, and organizations to get permission to include the documents in DigitalCommons@ILR.

The partnership with our own faculty required devising a “Faculty Participation Plan.”  After the ILR dean sent an e-mail to the faculty asking them to consider participation in DigitalCommons@ILR, we organized a coffee break/training session for the administrative assistants to the faculty.  We provided a general introduction and requested their help in encouraging faculty to retain copyright, not discard manuscripts, and respond to library staff when requests were made for particular versions of documents.  Then we were ready for the faculty!  In addition to speaking to them individually, we were able to make a group presentation at a regular ILR faculty meeting, where we discussed general issues of scholarly communication, using material on the Transforming Scholarly Communications and Libriaries Web site, and then demonstrated the specifics of DigitalCommons@ILR.  In an effort to make things as easy as possible, we simply asked faculty to tell us if they were interested and to provide us with a current vita.  A workflow was established that started with the faculty member’s vita and included everything from checking copyright permissions, negotiating with publishers, requesting final manuscript versions from faculty, and tracking all of this information in a database to eventually uploading the document with associated metadata into DigitalCommons@ILR.  Anecdotally, participating faculty members are pleased with the service, and especially with the statistics that are automatically e-mailed to them, indicating how many times papers are viewed or downloaded.

We now have over 1,550 documents with an average of 5,000 full-text weekly downloads, and we are working with the ILR Web Studios to develop a search interface that will harvest the metadata from DigitalCommons@ILR to enable searching and browsing of the documents from ILR Web pages.  This has not been a Field of Dreams “build it, and they will come” experience.  It has required major project management, collection development policy creation, workflow development, partnership building, ongoing negotiation, technology development, and data entry.  It’s amazing to think about all the people who have been involved!  Mary Newhart has led the way, with Fran Secord and Jim DelRosso acting as essential support staff.  Stuart Basefsky, Suzanne Cohen, David DeMello (ILR Web Studios), Deb Lamb-Deans, Gordon Law, Deb Schmidle, Patrizia Sione, and Richard Strassberg have either served on the DigitalCommons@ILR Working Group or played some other part in building the collection.  Of course, this list does not include all of the individuals in our “partner” organizations, but it gives you some idea of the resources that have been required to make DigitalCommons@ILR a success.

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