The Faculty Digital Archive at NYU

By Gary Shawver, Heather Stewart & Jennifer Vinopal

In this period of rapid technological change, research and communication systems are being transformed and, with them, the process of creating scholarly content. This process is increasingly collaborative, producing new knowledge in dynamic, mobile, and open environments. And each year, more and more scholarship has a digital component or is composed entirely of digital content.

How does one safeguard this scholarship for the future while making it available to the wider world? In the past, individuals or their departments have attempted to do this on their own by posting their work on departmental web servers, but this approach often leads to problems. For example, links to web pages are unstable, changing as documents are moved on the server; servers may not be backed up properly or at all; and the quantity of material may become unmanageable or outgrow the space on the server.

To address this challenge, NYU Libraries and ITS are preparing to implement a digital archive for NYU faculty. Also known as an institutional repository, a digital archive is "a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members."¹ A faculty digital archive can provide access to an institution's research through a single Internet access point. In it, scholars can store many different kinds of digital content, such as digital texts, audio, video, images, and datasets. This versatility allows for the integration of multiple files and formats so that faculty are able to associate research data, slides, and supporting files with papers.

The centralized framework of a digital archive allows scholars and departments to reliably archive their work without having to concern themselves with the technology and its administration, freeing them to focus on their academic goals. Because the content in a faculty digital archive can, if the depositor wishes, be made accessible to the world, it can increase the visibility of a scholar's work while providing a permanent link for citation. Scholars can therefore use the digital archive to quickly "pre-publish" materials, either to the world at large, or to a select group of colleagues for collaboration.

Panagiotis Ipeirotis, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, is an example of an NYU scholar who has begun to use the pilot Faculty Digital Archive. Working with NYU's digital library team, Dr. Ipeirotis has indexed content from more than 26 years of Stern research from both faculty and students, concentrated in the area of Information Systems. While most early papers have been published in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, the most recent works are at various stages of publication.

Making preprint papers available to others, including faculty, students, and research affiliates, is an important part of knowledge creation. In addition, placing content within the Faculty Digital Archive typically raises its visibility in Internet search engine results. The trend toward preprint availability is increasingly common among faculty at most universities. Many faculty are also interested in seeing their papers available on such sites as Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), and storing their research in the faculty digital archive will ensure that links to these materials will remain active over the years.

Additional information about NYU's new Faculty Digital Archive will appear at http://archive.nyu.edu once the pilot phase is complete.

Footnote

1. Clifford A. Lynch, "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age," ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html.