Institutional Repositories

Finding Open Access Articles – Tools & Tips

“How Many Clicks Does it Take?”   Update: I’ve updated this article on 9/12/2018 to include additional resources brought to my attention. I have also added that this post is licensed under CC-BY so please feel free to share, reuse & build this information (ideally with attribution). One of the pillars of libraries is facilitating access to the large corpus of existing knowledge. Typically this requires accessing gated information through a publisher or other service provider. Each institution can manage access to subscriptions in a way that works best for their communities – usually either by IP authentication or login credentials. This can be cumbersome for affiliates when not working onsite as there are often additional barriers to subscription access. Often this can require using Remote Desktop or a VPN to connect to a network before access is recognized. For the institution where I work this involves 10 – 15…

ITAL

Looking for Something to Read?

LITA publishes a quarterly, open-access and peer-reviewed journal called Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL). As a regular blogger for LITA, I was embarrassed to admit that I was not familiar with this publication when I recently met with Ken Varnum, the new editor. LITA and ITAL are both devoted to exploring the intersection between technology and libraries, everything from digital preservation to vendor relations. The journal is written by and for library technologists and will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2018. Not only is it available online, but several archival issues dating back to the 1960s are also available. Back in those days, the journal was known as the Journal of Library Automation (from 1968-1981), until 1982 when the name changed. In 2012, it switched from a print-only subscription publication to an online, open-access journal. Articles such as the 1972 “Regional Numerical Union Catalog on Computer Output Microfiche” provide a fascinating…

2008

Institutional Repositories: Design and Development, Panel Discussion

Developing and Institutional Repository: Implementation of DigiTool at Colorado State University Libraries Shu Liu, Colorado State University Yongli Zhou, Colorado State University The first panelists, Shu Liu and Yongli Zhou, describe implementing a IR through DigiTool, exLibris’s Digital Repository software and their talk focuses on using an out of the box product. Colorado State used contentdm from 01-present, but will migrate to digitool (which they’ve also been using since 07) by 09. Digitool has a series of web based client for the user and staff to interface with the the database. There are also access and maintenance components.Aspects of the digitool product can be customized, the icons, menu, header and footer, etc. They also did do some work customizing the metadata display and there were automated and manual ways to do these functions. They also implemented handles for their documents, though it was a bit difficult to implement and took…