I. Scope
This policy applies to any campus department, office, school, area or person affiliated with SUNY Cortland who may create, add, edit, or maintain a collection within Digital Commons.
II. Reason for this policy
Digital Commons@Cortland is an institutional repository with the intent to publicize and make available various collections created by SUNY Cortland faculty, staff, and students. This initiative was established by Memorial Library. Collections may include scholarly works such as journals or conferences, historical materials, dissertations, school or departmental records, and other creative works as well.
Collections are not limited to printed materials only; additional file types are also welcomed. Digital Commons is not meant to replace or be used in lieu of classroom tools such as Blackboard or Ensemble.
This policy is designed for the campus community to become acquainted with procedures when managing a collection through the Digital Commons repository. The policy outlines specific criteria on formats, access, ownership, structure, and accessibility. Additionally, it details workflow standards not only for a specific area on campus when maintaining a collection, but also when coordinating those efforts with Memorial Library.
III. Policy Statement
a) Access, Restrictions and Withdrawal
Digital Commons@Cortland is an institutional repository with the intent to publicize and make available various collections created by SUNY Cortland faculty, staff, and students. All content may have the ability to be downloaded, printed, or viewed online. In most cases, materials may be available to users outside the SUNY Cortland community. In certain situations, access to content may be restricted only to members of SUNY Cortland. Access restrictions may be at the discretion of the department, office, or school who maintains their own specific collections. Memorial Library does not maintain, edit, upload, or delete content for specific collections managed by other departments, offices, or schools. Content may be requested to be withdrawn due to copyright issues, privacy concerns, or violation of any standing SUNY Cortland Policies. Authors of works who wish to withdraw content they created should contact [email protected] for more assistance.
b) Authorship and Intellectual Ownership (Copyright)
All content on Digital Commons@Cortland should be created by College faculty, staff, or students. This may include on-campus conferences produced by SUNY Cortland, or other Cortland-sponsored events. Student creators of content may be asked to fill out a release form giving permission of the student and department to display such content. If there are questions regarding copyright and the content, contact the Library Director’s office.
c) Content
As noted in Authorship, all content included in Digital Commons@Cortland should be created by (or in collaboration with) Cortland faculty, staff, or students. Examples of content may include historical materials on the College, journal articles, Open-Access journals, conference materials, campus publications, special events, dissertations, reports, images, oral histories (audio), presentations, student or faculty scholarly, or other categories. Where possible, materials should be compliant with accessibility guidelines on submission (see Accessibility Statement below). For supported file types, also see below. Works not generally accepted may be materials in a file format not supported by Digital Commons, works that are not associated with SUNY Cortland, works that cannot be digitized, or are restricted for legal copyright reasons. These works will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
d) Accessibility Standards
The content uploaded to Digital Commons should aspire to meet Accessibility standards. SUNY Cortland follows its own Technology Accessibility Policy.
e) Procedure for requesting new Digital Commons content
Requesting a new Digital Commons community or collection is done by submitting the Digital Commons Collection Request form to the Digital Commons team. The Digital Commons platform is supported by our vendor/partner, Bepress. The Digital Commons Team within Memorial Library will meet with the requester after the initial form has been submitted to determine the type of collection/community. This may require multiple meetings that include input from the support staff at Bepress. The library staff will work with the requester and the support staff at Bepress to do the initial setup of the collection.
f) Workflow Standards
If the community/collection is maintained by a department, office, or school, they will need to assign administrators to help control their content. Administrators have the ability to add, edit, delete, and design content. This gives them the ability to build and maintain their own specific collection. Administrators from one department do not have access to another department’s collections; they are restricted to their own collections. In terms of initial setup, the steps below outline the workflow in creating a collection in Digital Commons@Cortland.
- Submit initial request using this form, which goes to the Digital Commons Team within Memorial Library.
- The team will work with your area on getting started. This will typically result in a few meetings to help understand your intent and vision.
- The team will assist you in setting up site administrators in your area, who would ultimately have control over your collection.
- In some cases, the outside department, office or school will need to create their own workflow/procedure in uploading and managing their own content.
g) Collection Requests and Support
Contact the library via [email protected] for questions on collections, subcommunities, publication types, metadata, or other related inquires. Memorial Library is not responsible for maintaining, adding, editing, or deleting content. However, we may assist you in locating solutions to your inquires or in some cases referring to Bepress if needed.
VI. Contact for clarification of this policy
Please contact us at [email protected] with questions on the policy or for creating or publishing content.
VII. Related information
Supported file types: Digital Commons supports a vast array of file types. These include text, data, images, and audio files. The size of each file may affect the initial download time. For example, a 33MB PDF file will take longer to access than a 4MB file. Popular files types include the following: Microsoft Word, PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, mp3, mp4, wav, plus others.
Structure - Digital Commons@Cortland is organized into a unique hierarchical structure using “communities,” “sub-communities,” and “publication types.” (“Communities” may also be referred to as “collections”). For example, a “community” may be the College Archives, while the “sub-community” is College Commencement, and finally a “publication type” can be images, audio, or text-based documents. Each structure level may be expanded or collapsed. For additional information on how the hierarchy structure works, visit Digital Commons Help
For additional information on “publication types,” visit Digital Commons Help
IX. Last Revision
October 2021.