Creating Collections of Student Work in Digital Commons
Professors can work with the library to create and curate student work in the university’s institutional repository, Digital Commons. Throughout the semester, the class’s embedded librarian(s) will provide instruction on scholarly communication, copyright, and metadata so that students can upload papers, presentations, or other projects to the repository.
Past Salve classes have created Digital Commons collections listed in the Student Work on Display section of the repository.
Benefits
- Because items published in Digital Commons will be accessible to the public and not just the professor or class, students have the incentive to produce higher-quality work.
- Students will be able to point to links of their work on their resumes and portfolios, and will receive readership statistics about the works they post.
- In gaining familiarity with copyright, students will develop knowledge surrounding intellectual property which will prepare them for professional life.
- In describing their own work in the item metadata on Digital Commons, students will improve their research skills from thinking about how to make their work more discoverable on the Web.
Guidelines
- Whenever possible, faculty interested in developing collections of student work in Digital Commons, should contact the library no later than the second week of the semester.
- A librarian must be embedded in the class throughout the semester in order to set up and assign editor rights to student accounts in Digital Commons, ensure that students are abiding by copyright, and that materials are described consistently and according to metadata standards.
- Students must agree to their materials being posted. Faculty cannot post student work, especially after the end of the semester, without student consent. It is not recommended that faculty take on the task of uploading student work themselves.
- Students must create accounts in Digital Commons in order to post their work. The embedded librarian will give these student accounts permission to upload and edit materials in Digital Commons, and the students will receive their readership statistics through this account.
- Students must abide by copyright law in the work that they are going to post in Digital Commons. Whereas student use of media like photographs created by other individuals falls under Fair Use in the classroom, publishing to Digital Commons requires students to adhere to the letter of the law. (This does not include short quotations used in analysis.) Librarians can assist students in finding public domain or Creative Commons-licensed materials. It is recommended that faculty evaluate student work before it is posted so that the work published online is of the highest quality and devoid of typos, citation or formatting errors, etc.
- It is recommended that when student work for upload is finished/graded, that the students’ description and upload with their Digital Commons accounts take place during class time under the supervision of a librarian.