Community and Collection Guidelines

[Shannon Kipphut-Smith]

Hi all,

Does anyone have local guidelines for creating communities and collections in their DSpace instance? We've found that, over 20 years, we've inconsistently created and named communities and collections. In addition to doing some reorg, we'd like to establish guidelines for new content and would benefit from seeing approaches at other institutions.

Thanks in advance for any resources you can share!

Best,

Shannon

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Shannon Kipphut-Smith (she/her)

Senior Scholarly Communication Librarian
Fondren Library, Rice University
sk...@rice.edu | (713)348-3989

Schedule a meeting with me | Fondren publishing support

[Jack Hang-tat Leong]

Hi Shannon,

 

Genny and I encountered a similar situation yesterday during a consultation with a faculty member. We have the following guidelines in place for YorkSpace:

 

Communities are the primary storage levels that house sub-communities and collections.

• Communities are created at the Faculty level, Academic Units (i.e. Teaching Commons, York University Libraries), and for Organized Research Units. 
• As of July 2023, Communities will no longer be created for departments, individual events or conferences, and for individual faculty members.  

Sub-Communities are secondary storage levels that are housed under Communities. 

• Sub-Communities are created at the faculty departmental level and may also be created for conferences and/or events that are organized and hosted on a yearly basis at York University. 

• As of July 2023, Sub-communities will no longer be created for one-off conferences hosted by York and for individual faculty members. However, the Libraries will create collections (see below) for one-off conferences. 

Collections are nested within Communities or Sub-Communities, and house digital objects.  

• As of July 2023, the Libraries will no longer be creating collections for individual faculty members.  

 

Best,
Jack Leong

 

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Jack Hang-tat Leong, PhD

(he / him)            

Digital Initiatives Librarian

Contact Librarian for Anthropology, Sociology and East Asian Studies

 

htl...@yorku.ca | yorku.ca

York University Libraries | YORK UNIVERSITY

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[Reed, Marianne A.]

Hi, Shannon!  I’ve seen this done many different ways in other repositories, but at KU, I inherited a structure with communities for academic units (Anthropology, Physics, etc.) with the collections underneath reflecting the academic unit (Anthropology Scholarly Works, Physics Scholarly Works, etc.)  This is done primarily to facilitate gathering statistics for that unit.  Each unit can see which faculty are participating in the repository and can track views and downloads.  I know that not all of them do, but the option is there and many departments find these statistics helpful.  I also have a Research Centers community to hold collections for individual research centers that aren’t affiliated with academic departments. 

 

In the past, we have sometimes been too granular and created individual collections for small sub-specialties in a department, but I wouldn’t do that today without a really good reason. 

 

Sometimes, in big schools such as Education or Engineering, we will create collections underneath the school’s community for individual divisions or research centers in the school, such as Special Education or the Infrastructure Research Institute.  Also, I’m not a big fan of empty collections, so I don’t create collections until I have something to put in the collection.  We have a mediated service, so I can create a collection whenever it’s needed, then deposit the item.   

 

Best regards,

Marianne

 

 

Marianne Reed (she/her/hers)

Digital Publishing & Repository Manager

Watson Library, Room 470-G

University of Kansas Libraries

mr...@ku.edu

785-864-8913

 

 

From: dspace-c...@googlegroups.com <dspace-c...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Shannon Kipphut-Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 8, 2025 10:20 AM
To: DSpace Community <dspace-c...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [dspace-community] Community and Collection Guidelines

 

Hi all,

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