Python for Information Professionals by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2023-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHOOSING AND SETTING UP AN INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY

Institutional repositories are important for storing knowledge and datasets produced by the researchers at a college or university. While ownership of intellectual property in the form of peer-reviewed and copyedited versions of manuscripts may be transferred to publishers, the original research products remain the right of the higher education institutions to share. The ease with which those institutional products can be accessed can have a tremendous impact on their usage. Many academic libraries already have some kind of institutional repository. If that is the case for you and your library (and you are happy with what you have), then congratulations! You can move on to the next section of this chapter. For those who do not have an institutional repository or want to try something new, read on!

What is needed for an institutional data repository? The answer to this question depends on your interests and those of your university administrators. Do you want to opt for a commercial product? If so, they will likely make everything quite easy for you and you need not read further either. But, of course, commercial products come with commercial costs, and those are often prohibitive for smaller colleges and universities. Also, keep in mind that a fair number of these commercial platforms are designed with traditional information resources in mind. Certain metadata and formatting options that work best for analysis with Python may not be well-supported by traditional institutional repository platforms (Pittard & Li, 2020).

One other solution that requires minimal technical effort is to opt for participation in Harvard University’s Dataverse project (https://dataverse.harvard.edu). The Dataverse is a huge repository hosted by Harvard, which aggregates research datasets from around the world. Individual researchers can create an account using their institutional affiliation and then directly upload documents to the repository. Of course, the drawback of this platform is that stewardship of the data falls to Harvard University, not the researcher’s university. The repository is also self-curated, meaning that that there is little oversight and limited support available—the extent to which different features and quality metadata are applied varies tremendously (Boyd, 2021). For this reason, a low-cost, university-specific data repository is likely to be preferred by most higher education institutions.

If you want to go the low-cost, high-control path, DSpace is the obvious choice. It has been used by hundreds of universities for over two decades. DSpace can be installed from dspace.lyrasis.org. It must be installed in two stages: first, the back-end content; then the front-end content, or user interface. DSpace repositories can be integrated alongside the existing library web platform via hyperlinking and are customizable according to a library’s needs. Though fairly simplistic in terms of layout, DSpace is intuitive for creators and users alike, with creators being able to upload metadata and other content in batches using csv files, and users able to navigate the content using search box and/or faceted searching, much like with traditional online library catalogs. It may not be the fanciest platform, but it is tried and true and can handle a variety of data formats.

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