Education faculty to house electronic assets in virtual space
Access to the research and expertise of faculty members will be greatly increased through an initiative underway in the Faculty of Education. The project will create links to a virtual space where faculty can house their electronic assets (journal articles, grey literature, e-books, MP3s, videos and the like), thereby providing open access to their work. The first phase of the repository project is underway: it will deposit digital assets into York’s institutional repository (‘YorkSpace”), and then create links from the faculty profiles on the Education web site to YorkSpace. In the second phase of the project, faculty profiles will be linked to electronic assets held on the Internet if copyright restrictions prevent the electronic assets from being placed in YorkSpace.
“This is a great project that is going to be of benefit to everyone in the Faculty of Education – educators and students alike. Our Faculty is well known for the rich and diverse research that it produces. One of the challenges we have faced is making this wonderful research more visible to a wider audience, and this D-Space Repository project will be an important means of reaching this goal,” commented Steve Gaetz, Associate Dean Research and Field Development.
The link for YorkSpace can be found at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/dspace/. Both YorkSpace and the faculty profiles can be viewed by the public. The Faculty of Education already has a “community” on YorkSpace, called “Faculty of Education.”
YorkSpace uses “DSpace” as its repository. DSpace is a repository that is used by several universities to house their open access journal articles, grey literature, pdfs, and other digital material. A list of institutions that are using DSpace for these purposes can be found at http://www.dspace.org/index.php/DSpace-Repositories/Repositories-Alphabetical.html.
Vennese Croasdaile, whose qualifications include an MSc in Information Science, is working on this project.
Some of the additional benefits of using YorkSpace as a repository are:
- It creates a permanent place to house the important work of faculty members; it is not dependent on York’s subscription to a journal that contains your work.
- It provides indicators of research results.
- It enables faculty members to link their personal web sites to this resource containing their work to provide access for potential collaborators or students,
- It could be used with your course management system.
In addition to linking the faculty profiles to YorkSpace, links will be made to the York libraries. However, access to publications that are contained in York’s electronic library will require a York Passport authentication and cannot be viewed by the general public.
The diagram below illustrates this scenario:
In the spirit of open access, the Faculty will aim to link to articles held in YorkSpace (which is an open access repository) before linking to articles held behind the York Libraries’ firewall.