The University of Wyoming (UW) Libraries are excited to join DLF and share news of three areas of emphasis within our Digital Collections Office.
- Digital UW, which serves as our digital collections repository for digitized holdings such as rare books, special collections materials, technical reports, departmental publications, images, audio, and video as well as born-digital content representing the same content types;
- The Wyoming Scholar’s Repository (WySR), which serves as our repository for scholarship produced at the university by faculty, staff, and students;
- In the development stages, we are working with the Advanced Research Computing Center on the UW campus to build a data repository for university-generated research data in order to comply with various funding mandates
Digital UW
Digital UW has been a whirlwind of migration work over the past two years. Our instance of Islandora, upon which Digital UW is built, had been run by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries’ Alliance Digital Repository (ADR) service, an Islandora repository shared across seven institutions in Colorado and Wyoming. In the spring of 2013, UW began moving all content from Islandora 6 and migrating to Islandora 7 as the first institution in the ADR to move to the new system. At the same time, we consolidated content that was housed in various other systems into Islandora 7. When we began migrating content from Islandora 6, we had roughly 500 GB of content. When we were done consolidating content, migrating version 6 content to version 7, as well as ingesting a 5+ year backlog of digitized content that had never seen the light of day, we wound up with 6.5 TB of content in Islandora 7. Soon after our migration to Islandora 7 was complete and stable, the ADR membership voted to shut down the shared repository. As a result, our office spent the summer of 2015 building and configuring yet another instance of Islandora 7 locally at the University of Wyoming. As of the writing of this article, Digital UW is up and running once more (after two system migrations in as many years).
One of the largest collections in Digital UW is the University of Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletins, available at http://hdl.handle.net/10176/wyu:12113. In 2013 the Digital Collections Office and one of our liaison librarians, David Kruger, applied for a CERES Award to digitize the entire run of this series, which runs from 1891 to 1965. While we are still ingesting content into Islandora, we are done with the digitization and quality control phases of the project. Many other collections, including books, audio, and video, are available in Digital UW.
Wyoming Scholar’s Repository
The Wyoming Scholar’s Repository (WySR) is a hosted by the Berkeley Electronic Press on the Digital Commons platform. UW uses this as its open access repository for scholarly content produced by UW faculty, students, and staff. Begun in 2012, that effort has resulted in numerous open access publications on the part of UW faculty, three open access journal publications, (notably the Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra and the UW National Park Service Research Center Annual Report), as well as numerous years of refereed student publications in the form of the Undergraduate Research Day collection. We’re actively working on new content in the form of conferences as well as the continuous work required to gather open access research publications from UW faculty.
Data Repository
A third and exciting new area of development in the UW Libraries is the planning and construction of an open data repository. Multiple librarians from the UW Libraries have been working with UW’s Information Technology (UW IT) group as well as UW’s Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC) to build a data repository. While the UW Libraries have expertise with the Islandora 7 repository system, upon which the new data repository will likely be built, ARCC has the storage capacity and resources to house large datasets. ARCC is gathering resources to offer up to a petabyte of storage while the Libraries are planning to build their second instance of Islandora 7 (we’re getting pretty good at this now since this will be our third one in two years!)-
While we are currently in the planning phase, many of the components parts of this service were put into place during the spring and summer of 2015. At that time, the UW Libraries secured access to the EZID service via the California Digital Library to offer DOI minting for UW faculty with data publishing needs. This was literally born out of a request from a few faculty on campus who needed to secure DOI’s for their datasets before their research submissions were accepted for publication. At about the same time, the UW Libraries made the decision to acquire an institutional membership with ORCID to help researchers manage their identities. Over the summer, ARCC and the UW Libraries identified four research groups on campus that are providing the data needed to learn how to implement the overall service. UW Libraries will be responsible for managing and maintaining the data repository (Islandora) itself as well as the assignment and management of the data, while ARCC is providing the infrastructure. We’re currently hoping to offer this service to UW researchers sometime in late 2016.
