Dspace at Wheaton College
Background
In late 2006, Wheaton elected to enroll in the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) DSpace Pilot Service, an offering that provides digital repository services for participating NITLE colleges via a hosted and shared instance of the DSpace open source software.
Background information about the history of the NITLE DSpace project may be found on NITLE's web site in the section on Managed Technology Services - The DSpace Pilot Service . Documents and files currently in DSpace from a number of the NITLE colleges can be browsed or searched at the NITLE DSpace site.
Wheaton's DSpace Project, still in pilot phase in 2008, is one important step toward producing a master plan for digital content preservation and management at Wheaton. Its focus is on the preservation of and wider access to Wheaton-produced intellectual content, using DSpace open-source software, in what is often called an institutional repository (IR).
DSpace at Wheaton
The Wallace Library has long considered the preservation and access to academic content central to our mission. Particularly through our Archives and Special Collections, we have attended to the preservation and access to Wheaton-produced intellectual content. In the case of honors theses, for example, we have bound, catalogued, preserved and loaned photocopies of our honors theses for decades. In providing and supporting an institutional repository at Wheaton, we are fulfilling our mission by digitally preserving material -- we are even extending it, by sharing scholarship more widely and more easily via the Internet.
In April 2007, staff in Library and Information Services (LIS) decided to begin our DSpace experiment using selected student publications and honors theses. Several issues of Rushlight, Wheaton College's literary and visual arts journal, have been digitized and deposited in Wheaton's IR. Honors theses, across a variety of academic departments were solicited, resulting in four that were enthusiastically supported by faculty advisors and student authors for deposit in our IR.
Honors Theses
In spring 2008, Wheaton will expand the honors thesis DSpace collection by asking all faculty advisors to select theses for inclusion in Wheaton's institutional repository. We strongly encourage thesis advisors and thesis authors to consider the benefits of depositing theses there. See Benefits and Considerations for posting honors theses and other scholarship in DSpace.
After permission decisions have been made and granted, students will submit an electronic copy of their thesis to Wheaton's Honors Theses DSpace Community. (Links to Instructions are available from this page.)
Future Plans
We plan to deposit additional content in our DSpace IR as follows:
- Student academic work (posters, web pages, projects, art work, etc.)
- Midnight Oil (faculty nominated student scholarship, published annually)
- Maintaining a record of important campus-wide activities
- Important material from Wheaton's history from the Archives
This page is maintained by Mason Brown. Last updated on 4/28/08.
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