FAU Digital Library: About US
I. Mission: Access and Dissemination
The mission of the Digital Library at Florida Atlantic University Libraries is to provide access and dissemination to the unique and rare materials held by the University Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives and the contributed scholarly content created by FAU faculty, staff, students, and research partners. The FAU Digital Library manages digital assets such as digitized rare manuscripts, Yiddish children's literature, sheet music, archival photographs, and oral histories. Digital collections also include FAU campus scholarship such as historical student newspapers, theses and dissertations, faculty publications, technical reports, and graduate and undergraduate research posters. These digital collections are hosted using the open source Islandora digital platform supported by the Florida Virtual Campus FL-Islandora of the Florida state university system. The FAU Digital Library supports open access collections. Some content may be restricted via embargo at the author’s request or subject to access limits and restricted to FAU campus members only. The FAU Digital Library makes no warranties for the content or research contributed and copyright holders retain their copyright when contributing content and are granting FAU Libraries nonexclusive distribution rights.
II. Digital Curation: Processes and Systems
The FAU Digital Library utilizes the Islandora repository platform to manage content and provide open access to digital collections. Islandora is an open source software system built on a base of Drupal, Fedora, and Solr. The FAU Digital Library is part of FL-Islandora instance hosted by the Florida Academic Library Services Cooperative (FALSC).
Digital collection building includes: the scanning or digitization of analog materials, the reformatting or conversion of digital born objects, and the creation of descriptive metadata utilizing best practice standards in all of these processes. The FAU Digital Library curates and describes materials using the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) for the purpose of ingesting objects into a content management system for display. Digital collection building is recognized by the National Information of Standards and Organizations’ Framework for Building Digital Good Collections as a core library service. The Digital Library team creates digital collections in accordance with NISO standards and the units Collection Development Policy. Digital collections are the building blocks of Digital Libraries which provide a suite of services beyond digitization and display including:
Interoperability - the Digital Library provides persistent URL identifiers (PURLs) which provide permanent access to digital objects and enable the interoperability of open access repositories in accordance with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
Discoverability - the Digital Library implements processes and strategies to optimize discoverability of its digital collections. Optical character recognition software is used so that text objects are full-text searchable and metadata is enriched to improve discovery. OAI-PMH is utilized for metadata harvesting to OCLC’s Digital Collection Gateway and the Digital Public Library of America.
Digital Publishing - the Digital Library utilizes open source software tools such as Islandora as a digital asset management system, ArchiveSpace for finding aids, and the Open Journal System (OJS) to assist faculty, students, and researchers in publishing online open access journals at FAU to advance scholarly communications at Florida Atlantic University.
III. Assessment: Usage and Analysis
The Digital Library provides annual statistics to the ACRL-IPEDS survey. The primary assessment tool used for digital collections is google analytics and internal tracking spreadsheets for digital production. The following criteria may be utilized in assessment:
Digital File Creation-the number of digital files created, converted, or ingested into the repository.
Title Records for Digital Objects- a single digital serial title in the repository may contain hundreds or thousands of created digital files.
Site Usage Statistics-the number of views of specific object and collections, or number of landings on a page.
IV. Appendix
FAU Digital Library Collection Development Policy