On Thursday, May 23, CSU announced it will be one of four major Colorado universities forming a “muti-library partnership” to share digital information gathered between the campuses.
CSU, CU Boulder, Colorado Mesa University, and Colorado School of Mines are working together to create the “Digital Collections of Colorado” (DCC). The system will function as way to make scholarly digital files from every school accessible to faculty, staff, and students at the other universities.
The information that will be shared includes dissertations, theses, papers by faculty, digital photos, maps and images of artifacts in the libraries’ collections, and videos of campus events, according to a press release received by the Collegian.
The info shared will be available not only to students and staff at the four schools, but will also allow the research at each university to be accessed at a national and international level.
According to Patrick Burns, CSU Vice President for Information Technology and Dean of Libraries, the DCC will also allow for the information gathered to be searchable on the internet.
“One of the things that we do is we make sure that the system is crawled well, crawled properly, and crawled often by Google web crawlers so things are discoverable,” Burns said.
The information comes from the four main universities as well as CSU Pueblo, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Auraria Library, and University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. Currently nine libraries are participating and there are talks with other libraries in the works.
“We’re having those conversations right now,” said Burns. “We probably are going to try to get more schools participating and it could be schools that are regional and not just in the state of Colorado.”
Our own Morgan Library will be hosting the service and providing staff support, as CSU has already had a digital repository for more than 10 years that was updated very recently.
“We said it would be easy for us to add other libraries into that system and other that as a shared service,” said Burns.
The system will be of great service to the libraries involved and to anyone looking to access the scholarly information our schools have to offer.
“We will have a growing need to curate, deposit and provide perpetual open access to the intellectual assets of the Boulder campus, and this repository provides the state-of-the-art means to do so,” said James Williams, CU Boulder’s Dean of Libraries.
The DCC can be found at digitool.library.colostate.edu/R.
Senior Reporter McKenna Ferguson can be reached at news@collegian.com.
