Session Title: Integrating an OpenCourseWare and Institutional Repository
Presenters: Heather Leary, Institutional Repository Coordinator, Utah State University
Brett Shelton, Director, Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, Utah State University
Time & Date: 10:15 A.M. - 11:00 A.M., Friday, August 14, 2009
Location: Rm. C150
Session Description:
OpenCourseWare and Institutional Repository
Utah State University’s OpenCourseWare (USU OCW) is an open access repository of educational materials powered by EduCommons. Under continuous development, the collection currently includes courses from irrigation engineering, instructional technology, and other areas, with the long-term goal of supporting almost every course offered by Utah State University.
Utah State also maintains an Institutional Repository (IR). Utah State’s IR archives and provides access to the scholarship and intellectual output of an institution. Found worldwide, IRs provide exposure, information discovery, and preservation to a wide range of content such as research articles, dissertations, theses, reports, books, gray literature, data sets, photographs, conference papers, and some teaching materials.
The easy accessibility of material in an open access platform like an IR, along with open discovery through Google, OCLC, and Google Scholar greatly enhances discovery and reuse of research while also enhancing the prestige of authors and their affiliated institutions.
Why Archive OCW in an IR?
There are several reasons why a school would want to archive their OCW in their IR. With the material in two places, the content can reach a wider audience as users have more than one point of entry. Users may browse the material in different ways. On an OCW site, content is divided into courses by colleges and courses. In an institutional repository users can browse courses submitted by specific faculty members, year, title, subject, and full-text.
The IR also provides a new avenue for showcasing the instructional sector of an institution. It provides easy ways to archive and present versions of courses. As instructors update their course and refine them, access to these versions of the course provides a historical footprint of the course.
Integrating OCW and IR
Utah State University uses Digital Commons, a commercial platform powered by the Berkeley Electronic Press, for hosting their IR. The Digital Commons software provides different options for accessing content. These include linking to the online content, providing a downloadable version of the material, and both together. Due to the nature of USU’s OpenCourseWare as html webpages, ideally the archived version of this material would be a webpage with the option to download the full html course.
Discussions with bepress revealed that other users have interest in the platform archiving webpages. The company embraces the opportunity to provide services needed by their customers and is flexible in its approach to accommodating the changing content and technologies relevant to IRs. As development can take time, integration the OCW into the IR at USU in occurring in stages, beginning with links to the courses. As the EduCommons software improves, html files will be added for download to the site; and as demand increases for archiving of webpages, bepress will move forward to provide support for the archiving of OCW content.
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You can find the slides for this presentation archived in our Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/lib_present/8/
We were side tracked a bit in the live presentation with the platforms being used for our Digital Commons. I hope that everyone realizes the importance of their Librarians for teaching, open education, access, and archiving. Archiving OCW is important (MIT already does it) and it provides another entry point to the courses. Please use your Librarians, they are great advocates for you!
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