Among the pioneering uses by Digital Commons@ customers:
- Boston College has launched Teaching Exceptional Children Plus, the first of several e-journals planned for presentation within eScholarship@BC, as its institutional repository is known. The bi-monthly, e-only journal has a streamlined publication cycle that benefits from Digital Commons@’s unique peer review model. For more details, see http://escholarship.bc.edu/education/tecplus/.
- Boston College is also creating an innovative multimedia presence in its Digital Commons@ site with its Church in the 21st Century Project. Materials include both text and audio-visual files, including an archived webcast video. To learn more, visit http://escholarship.bc.edu/church21/.
- The University of Pennsylvania has loaded more than 3,000 digitized dissertations into Scholarly Commons@Penn, its repository site launched in late summer. This represents a huge volume of material to have available just after launching its repository.
- Small colleges as well as the largest universities are embracing the idea of access to their intellectual history. Dickinson College, Trinity College, Stevens Institute of Technology and Middlebury College have loaded undergraduate or honors papers. They’re finding that an institutional repository is a good recruiting tool, as well as a research asset.
- Several prestigious liberal arts institutions have banded together to create an “umbrella” repository under which materials from each of their unique Digital Commons@ materials are available. Visit http://digitalcommons.dickinson.edu/cdmt/ to explore this content.
“We see tremendous potential in Digital Commons as a way to maximize the visibility and availability of scholarship produced by the Boston College community. We've been using this pilot as a way to demonstrate the potential scope and value of the repository, to campus administrators, faculty, trustees, and others. Response to the concept has been very positive,” said Bob Gerrity, Head of Systems, O'Neill Library, Boston College.
Digital Commons@ was introduced at the American Library Association annual conference last June. Powered by the vigorous Bepress platform (the technology partner driving the University of California's eScholarship Repository), it offers a highly desirable combination of functionality and price that is unmatched by any other IR product currently on the market. Among its key features:
- Innovative peer-review management technology used by professional journal publishers
- All of an academic library’s dissertation content can be immediately uploaded
- Faculty outreach via automated emails, which encourage content submission
- Personalized saved searches and email notification of updates available in the repository
- Customizable controlled vocabulary pick-lists for keyword and subject area fields
- Usage reporting to the item level
“Subscribers are excited that they can set up a fully functional, feature-rich Institutional Repository in a matter of hours, for less investment than the do-it-yourself options,” said Austin McLean, director of scholarly communication and dissertations publishing for ProQuest. A review of ProQuest’s IR program appears on the University of Pennsylvania web site: http://repository.upenn.edu/mission.html.
Libraries may receive more information by contacting their account representative at 1-800-521-0600, ext. 2793 (outside the U.S., call +44-1-223-215-512) or umisalesinfo@il.proquest.com. Editors may call 1-800-521-0600, ext. 6489 or email pr@il.proquest.com .
About ProQuest Information and Learning
ProQuest Information and Learning is a world leader in collecting, organizing, and publishing information worldwide for researchers, faculty, and students in libraries and schools. Known widely for its strength in business and economics, general reference, humanities, social sciences, and STM content, the company develops premium databases comprising periodicals, newspapers, dissertations, out-of-print books, and other scholarly information from more than 8,500 publishers worldwide. Users access the information through the ProQuest® Web-based online information system, Chadwyck-HealeyTM electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print reference products, eLibrary® and SIRS® educational resources, and XanEdu® online faculty and student resources. For more information about ProQuest Information and Learning, visit www.il.proquest.com.
ProQuest Information and Learning is a business unit of ProQuest Company (www.proquestcompany.com), which was recently named one of the top 100 fastest growing technology companies in the United States by Business 2.0 and one of the 200 best small companies by Forbes Magazine.
