Something Old, Something New , Something Bold, Something Cool: A Marriage of T wo Repositories

For the past several years, many libraries have been developing institutional repositories to house their open

access publishing efforts to both showcase and preserve their faculty’s research. Some of those same libraries

have been building sizable digital collections, often built from digitized versions of materials in their special

collections.

So what happens when you put these two groups together? The University of South Florida Tampa Library did

exactly that by creating a new Digital Scholarship Services unit. The union of these two groups has created new

synergies between staff in complementary areas of the library, as we combine unique skill sets from each group

to offer new services to the faculty.

This presentation will discuss why this change was made, examine some of the benefits and growing pains of

this change, and showcase some of the unusual projects that have resulted. For example, a group of faculty from

the College of Education has a multimodal project featuring new methodological approaches for analyzing

various formats such as websites, images, and film. The library also has two research associates who are

archaeologists creating three dimensional representations of artifacts for cultural heritage preservation that are

now embedded with metadata in the repository. Creating such collections not only highlights the university’s work

but provides materials professors can use to enhance their course curricula and use technology to engage

students in new and innovative ways.