Bridging the Gap between Digital Measures and Digital Commons in Support of Open Access: Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love human mediation
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-11-06
Summary:
Use the link to access the full text article from the institutional repository of Clemson University. The introduction reads as follows: "Utah State University is home to a thriving institutional repository (called DigitalCommons@USU), an instance of the activity-reporting tool, Digital Measures (DM), and, as of May 30th, 2012, an institutional open access policy. In 2008, shortly after USU Libraries launched the institutional repository, efforts were made to harness the university-wide reporting capabilities of Digital Measures. The latter, managed by USU’s Office of Analysis, Assessment, and Accreditation, was seen to be an important tool in developing the IR, as faculty are required to record their activities and intellectual contributions to this internal database. These initial efforts, however, were not largely successful and subsequently deprioritized. A changing campus culture, the passage and implementation of an open access policy, and changes in the capabilities of Digital Measures, though, prompted us to reexamine the relationship between Digital Measures and our institutional
repository (IR) in hopes of finding new ways to automate the migration of data from the former to the latter. We found that while near-total automation appeared possible, in the interest of remaining in compliance with copyright law and ensuring
the best quality metadata in our repository, it was perhaps not desirable. This article describes our initial attempts at DM and DigitalCommons @USU (DC) integration, the passage and implementation of USU’s open access policy, and how
this policy prompted a multi-faceted implementation approach that included a human-mediated harvest of material from DM."