The Faculty Digital Archive
Terrell Johnson
Editors’ note: ITS offers a palette of resources for the storage, management, and sharing of files and data. Several of these were featured in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Connect. Here, we feature another offering in this dynamic and evolving service area for NYU and ITS.
The Faculty Digital Archive (FDA) is a place where full-time NYU faculty can deposit their work in digital form and share it via the web. Content can be open to the world, or restricted to the NYU community or selected individuals. The FDA is intended to be a highly visible repository of NYU faculty digital scholarship. With unlimited storage, and a technology designed to enable easy discovery (in Google Scholar, for example), the FDA is a great choice for sharing papers, research materials, video, audio, and images. In addition, it ensures a stable online location for your work, making citations to it as reliable as those within scholarly journals. Faculty and scholars looking for a flexible and easy-to-use option for storage and sharing should consider using the FDA.
Getting Started
Before setting up a collection, you must first decide on whether a public or private collection is the right choice for your purpose. Public collections are open to the world and are indexed by search engines, such as Google. Private collections can be restricted to the NYU community or to designated individuals. Faculty and scholars interested in creating a collection should email archive.help@nyu.edu. A member of the FDA service management team will assist you in the creation of your collection.
Once your collection is created, you can customize it with a logo, add descriptive text, add users as submitters or administrators, and upload content. Uploading content is an easy process, and all content can be labeled with descriptive metadata and tags.
A Few Sample Uses
The FDA is used daily throughout the NYU community. The Leonard N. Stern School of Business uses the FDA to store thousands of working papers and research materials gathered from their faculty. Professors at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development archive hundreds of teaching and learning videos from classroom observations. And hundreds of images, documents, and videos are archived by the Graduate School of Arts & Science for its Museum Studies program.
FDA or Files 2.0?
Files 2.0 is NYU’s web-based file storage system that is available to all part- and full-time faculty, staff, and students. With 2 GB of space, a very intuitive interface, and website-hosting capabilities, Files 2.0 is a great choice for storing your files for short-term use. The chart at the right compares some key features of these two services.
For more about the FDA, Files 2.0, and other options for file storage, management, and sharing, please visit www.nyu.edu/its/filestorage.
Author Biography
Terrell Johnson is a Digital Studio Technology Specialist
within the NYU Digital Studio, a joint Libraries/ITS resource.