The McGoogan Library of Medicine has created Digital Commons@UNMC, an electronic institutional repository of research, scholarly communications and archival materials produced or owned by members of the UNMC community.
The repository launched on May 8, and the library is currently seeking material from UNMC faculty and students to add to it.
“We’re trying to evaluate how we can represent the scholarly output of UNMC as a whole,” said assistant professor Alissa Fial of the McGoogan staff.
Faculty publications will be an important part of the new repository, with McGoogan assistant professor Heather Brown and a team reviewing UNMC-affiliated authors and their publications for inclusion.
“It’s a question of what is permissible from the publisher,” she said.
The library also will incorporate the e-learning modules created as part of the “flipped classroom” initiative.
“The institutional repository will serve as a platform or showcase for these modules,” Brown said.
“That goes back to our idea of the scholarly output,” Fial added. “The researchers and faculty here, they’re not just about one thing, so we want to fully represent who they are as scholarly individuals. That includes their teaching.”
A third focus will be the collections in the library themselves.
“We looked in-house to see what is unique about McGoogan,” Fial said. To start with, “we decided to focus on our infant feeding devices, which we affectionately call ‘the baby bottles.’ Some of them are ancient. This is a way to showcase something unique about McGoogan and share it with the world.”
Work doesn’t have to be published, Brown said.
“There is so much that comes out of the university that doesn’t wind up in a journal or a book — technical reports, conference materials,” she said. “We’d like to put that out there. We also can host conferences, publications, journals produced in-house, newsletters.”
The result, in time, will be an electronic collection to rival the paper manuscripts in the library now.
“Anyone in the world can access these materials,” Fial said. “The platform we’re using is highly searchable through Google or Google Scholar.”
The library will take care of uploading material, and McGoogan staff also check on copyrights and ensure the correct permissions are available.
Once the information is loaded, it will be connected with the author’s email address, and the website will generate monthly usage reports tracking the number of downloads.
To submit works for inclusion or for more information, contact the library staff here.