It took just 18 months for University of Nebraska-Lincoln archivists to create the Digital Commons, a now internationally ranked online database of more than 15,000 papers, essays and articles.
The archive was recently bumped to the fourth largest in the U.S. and is in the top 15 worldwide in terms of size, ac-cording to grading by the Registry of Open Access Repositories, or ROAR.
The directories of the University of Michigan, Ohio State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are the only three in the nation with more materials than the UNL commons. Each has been available for more than five years.
The University of California's archive, which UNL surpassed to gain ROAR's fourth-place ranking, is more than 10 years old. "We've been working very hard to populate (the UNL data-base) with content. We're probably the fastest growing digital archive in the United States at this point," said Paul Royster, UNL's Digital Commons director.
Royster began uploading around 10,000 doctorial dissertations written by UNL faculty members to the database in 2005. Since then, he and his staff of five students have added more than 5,000 other materials, and continue to add to the service piece by piece.
"There's been a movement for the past two or three years, and Nebraska Libraries is in the front rank because we're interested in electronic access," Royster said....
"(It) showcases our faculty and student research, increasing the visibility of their work and providing an easy way for potential students to see the breadth and depth of the work done at UNL," said Joan Giesecke, dean of libraries for UNL, in a press release Tuesday.
The Digital Commons aver-ages around 2,000 hits, or view or searches of content, per day. More than 800 documents are downloaded on average each day....
Amidst the recent popularity of open source systems, registries like ROAR have become more common as well. ROAR has existed in its current form for two years, said the registry's director Tim Brody....ROAR tracks archives based on size, type and growth. "We want to encourage both the setting up, but more importantly, the filling of repositories," [Brody] said. "In order to encourage the filling of repositories we need to know how much stuff there is in them."
Comment. This is an OA success story. Kudos to UNL for wanting to make it happen. Special credit goes to Paul Royster and Jean Giesecke for delivering. Another part of the campus OA culture not mentioned in the article is that UNL provost Barbara Couture signed the July 2006 GWLA Provost Letter endorsing FRPAA.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/03/2006 01:15:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
