PurposeThe purpose of this case study is to demonstrate a current model, as well as explore future models, for integrating institutional repositories (IRs) in higher education goals at the University of Toledo.
Design/methodology/approachThis is a case study that uses literature review as an exploratory framework for new approaches while reflecting on existing literature to present the current practical framework for using IRs.
FindingsThe digital environment has pushed academic institutions toward new strategies for curating their record on scholarship and preserving their heritage collections, using their IRs. Innovative approaches are also vital to curating the IR content digitally to facilitate access to those contents in ways that was not possible a few decades ago. Surveys and existing literature point to increasing uses of IRs despite abstinence from considering open access for scholarly activity among faculty concerned about copyright, plagiarism and sustainability. Staffing and funding IR initiatives are important factors in sustaining the curation of scholarship in the digital environment.
Practical implicationsIRs with open access publishing, expert gallery and digital library features place academic libraries in a central role as partners in digital scholarship.
Originality/valueThis case study presents an original approach to incorporating the IR into the curation of digital content while also considering potential uses of knowledge management approaches for data and knowledge sharing in an academic environment.
Networked co-curation is an innovative outreach practice in archives and museums using social media with other Web 2.0 technologies in order to curate digital heritage collections. It relies on crowd-sourced curation, which results in richer discourse through globally dispersed public participation and intersubjective perspectives. The theoretical framework for networked co-curation consists of three dimensions: digital history, digital humanities, and social network theory. Historical representation, intertextuality, and remediation play a vital role in networked co-curation, forming a bridge between digital content and a transforming virtual audience. Networked co-curation present three significant concerns for archives, libraries, and museums: provenance verification, knowledge representation, and staffing. Toledo's Attic has been a co-curation initiative involving multi-type organizations and their respective audiences. It has used various types of software and platforms and is now being migrated to Joomla, which has been the most robust solution thus far. The networked co-curation and outreach program for Toledo's Attic has utilized the following networks: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, BlogSpot, Pinterest, HistoryPin, and YouTube with the Website occupying a central location for each reach to it virtual audience. Data gathered from Google Analytics and Facebook point to relationship between co-curation activities across these domains but continuous data collection is necessary for informed management of this content.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.