About Academic Commons and Columbia's Institutional Repository Program

In 2005, Columbia University Libraries began working toward the development of an institutional repository that will allow more effective organization, dissemination, and preservation of scholarly and research content created at Columbia.  The content of this repository may include material such as conference and discussion papers, dissertations, preprints, research papers, technical reports, theses, and working papers.  In the first phase of Columbia's institutional repository pilot program, the Libraries tested DigitalCommons, software developed by Berkeley Electronic Press, as a possible service platform.

In the second phase, we have chosen to install a local instance of the DSpace software from MIT and migrate all content from DigitalCommons@Columbia.   This new publications repository has been renamed “Academic Commons.”  Academic Commons began operations in October 2007, and currently holds Columbia papers and reports.  The creation of a locally run repository permits us to tailor the system to meet Columbia’s particular needs.  It also allows us to test a variety of ways to archive and provide permanent access to departmental working papers, preprints and other so-called "grey literature."

The Libraries are interested in hearing from academic departments, schools, institutes, etc. that wish to be considered for early representation in the institutional repository program. We are particularly interested in departments that have active programs for issuing working papers, preprints or technical reports. If you or your department would like more information about this initiative, please send email to academiccommons@columbia.edu.

The next phase of the program will develop an interface to Columbia dissertations through Academic Commons, in order to replace Proquest’s commercial interface to dissertations.   The current DigitalCommons interface will be maintained until the alternative is in place.  Dissertations are also available online via the ProQuest Digital Dissertations and Theses database, but incorporation in AcademicCommons will enhance searching and include browsing by author, title, date, and department. Abstracts and links will continue to be made available for "harvesting" by scholarly and popular search engines such as Google and Google Scholar.

Further Information on Institutional Repositories:

Tim Brody.  "Institutional Archives Registry." (a world-wide listing of institutional repositories and archives)
<http://archives.eprints.org/index.php>.

Crow, Raym.  "The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper." Washington, DC: The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, 2002.
<http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html>.

Lynch, C. & Lippincott, J.K.  "Institutional Repository Deployment in the United States as of Early 2005." D-Lib Magazine Sept. 2005.
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lynch/09lynch.html>.