BarnardRefDesk

On Monday, if all goes well, our current institutional repository system (DigitalCommons@Columbia) will be replaced by the new "Academic Commons" repository. You can preview Academic Commons.

Initially the content of Academic Commons will be the same as DigitalCommons, with the same three content 'communities':

Center on Japanese Economy and Business working papers, etc.
Economics Department discussion papers
Columbia Dissertations and Theses

Over the next months you'll be hearing from the new Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) about plans for enlarging Academic Commons with additional collections and communities.

Under the hood Academic Commons differs from Digital Commons in that it is built on a local implementation of the open source dSpace software, rather than on the commercially-vended, remotely-hosted ProQuest system. The dSpace-based system will allow us more flexibility in developing our institutional repository over time and more options for integrating the content into other CUL and campus information systems.

We have tried to minimize the impact of this change on current users by configuring a full set of redirects from the old system to the new, so as not to break bookmarks or URL references that users of the DigitalCommons may have made. All items in Academic Commons now and in the future will have a permanent CNRI "handle" assigned rather than the ProQuest-specific URLs available in DigitalCommons.

The main differences between Academic Commons and DigitalCommons that staff might encounter are in the Columbia Dissertations and Theses collection. In the new system, descriptive information displayed for Columbia dissertations will now be based on catalog records extracted from CLIO rather than on data supplied directly by ProQuest. (Actually what's displayed in Academic Commons is a combination of CLIO and ProQuest data, since we want to continue to acquire and load ProQuest's valuable dissertation abstracts in Academic Commons and CLIO.) This change in information flow will mean, among other things, that individual dissertations may show up in Academic Commons at different times than they do in ProQuest Dissertations and Theses or would have in DigitalCommons. The actual workflows for getting accurate information about new online dissertations into CLIO and then into Academic Commons are still being developed and will doubtless improve over time.

Other differences in the Columbia Dissertations collection include:

• Links to dissertations within Academic Commons now point directly to ProQuest's standard Digital Dissertations and Theses portal rather than to a DigitalCommons landing page.
• Records for 'embargoed' dissertations, which did not appear at all in DigitalCommons, will appear Academic Commons; users asking to view such dissertations, however, will see a message on the ProQuest site about the dissertation being withheld by the author.
• The browsable list of Columbia dissertations arranged by academic department will be generated from CLIO rather than created manually by LDPD staff; here again, there will need to be some level of CLIO clean up before the list is completely accurate.
  

Answers to Other Likely Questions:

• The need for this quick cutover to Academic Commons / dSpace is in part because the license for the DigitalCommons is expiring and we don't want to spend waste additional $$ on extending it for another year.
• The "DigitalCommons" name has been trademarked by ProQuest / BePress and so cannot continue to be used after our license expires, hence the new name, "Academic Commons"
• Any questions, problems, anomalies should be reported to: academiccommons@columbia.edu
  

Labels: CUL, digitization