OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons: Building Your Repositories
Executive Summary
OhioLINK's Digital Resource Commons (DRC) vision is to leverage statewide economies of scale with a content repository service that enables all OhioLINK members and other Ohio institutions to rapidly publish and comprehensively access the wealth of research, historic and creative materials produced by Ohio's scholarly communities. The DRC service will accept, preserve, present, and mediate administration of the educational and research materials of participating institutions. Member institutions can create, use, and manage content stored and preserved on OhioLINK servers without redundant and costly local investments; in doing so, the entire membership can reap the benefits of locally-created content and share in the challenges and burdens of ensuring long-term preservation access.
The OhioLINK DRC will have capabilities to meet the needs of Ohio's scholars and researchers:
- Institutional Repository: Research portfolios such as pre-prints, post-prints or working papers
- Web-Mediated Peer Review Electronic Journals: Supporting open access self-archiving and publishing
- Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Web-mediated submission, tracking, acceptance, and publication of student works
- Learning Object Repository: Connected to a campus' Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) for storage and retrieval of course content
- Online Exhibition System: Digital library platform for libraries, archives, and special collections
A virtually unlimited variety of digital file types and formats will be supported including text, data sets, image, audio, video, streaming video, multimedia presentations, animations, and simulations. Repository visitors will be able to search within collections or across institutional, location, and subject boundaries to gather materials for their research. This statewide access dimension adds significant value to the contribution of institutions. A DRC community will also be able to take advantage of a wide variety of visitor tools such as open commentary (a la blogs or guestbooks), annotation/enhancement (offer new information or suggest changes to descriptions), and an overlay of community knowledge (such as reader recommendation services and shared ad hoc collections).
The DRC will offer flexible control to institutions and communities within institutions to define how content is added, preserved, and displayed to repository users. The ability to 'brand' content to a particular community or institution will be offered while retaining the ability to search for content across the entire repository. To the end user it will appear to be the institution's repository -- as if it were hosted on an institution's own servers.
Participating institutions can set flexible access rights for repository content. Using the Shibboleth distributed access management protocol, multi-tiered security levels can be defined, allowing content (or particular derivatives of content) to be shared only to the extent desired. Planned access options include: worldwide, OhioLINK members, single institution, department, course/section, workgroup, and peer disciplines. The latter could be used, for instance, to make content available to all of the anthropology students in the state. The DRC can be configured to allow authors as well as community editors/moderators to define the access rights to repository objects.
A rich set of content management tools are planned for the DRC. It will support a variety of workflow scenarios, including simple institutional repository publishing, web-mediated peer review, and electronic journal publishing as well as tools such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), semi-automated video segmenting, and descriptive record enhancement. Objects added to the DRC will automatically be assigned a unique identifier such that content can be referenced and cited worldwide. Descriptive records will be available in international standard XML formats such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
Repository content will be stored on enterprise class servers and storage networks. These servers are located close to the OARnet internet backbone ensuring maximum availability and speed. A large storage area network will allow for virtually unlimited storage space while regular offsite tape and disk backup will ensure the safety and security of content. The DRC offers not only a promise of high availability for today's needs, but also the commitment to long-term preservation to this primary source material.
The DRC is positioned to become the premier point for the discovery of knowledge by and about Ohio's scholars. In conjunction with the other parts of the Ohio Board of Regents grant funding, the DRC is one piece of a larger effort to build the Ohio Digital Commons for Education -- a powerful vision for the future of learning and research in the state of Ohio.
