The VU e-Archive, Vanderbilt University's Electronic Archive

Guidelines for Communities and Collections Sought for the VU e-Archive

The VU e-Archive, an institutional repository, is being created to house, preserve, and distribute digital materials of general interest that are produced by Vanderbilt communities, and that might otherwise disappear. As the VU e-Archive neither can nor should preserve every document produced on campus, VUSpace and web pages still retain relevant roles. Vanderbilt’s own e-journals also constitute a separate entity, although the lines distinguishing these and other digital options are often blurred. Restrictions of the peer review process, commercial publishing, and copyright do set some limits on which documents may be added to an institutional repository. Nevertheless, the University contains many digital materials both appropriate and desirable for storage, access, and preservation via the VU e-Archive.

The VU e-Archive is organized hierarchically into communities and collections to represent the interests of faculty, staff, and students.

A VU e-Archive community:

• Is a self-constituting group at Vanderbilt;
• Includes at least some faculty members/administrators associated with the University;
• Can designate a coordinator to work with Vanderbilt Libraries staff;
• Produces materials likely to be of some general interest to users in the future;
• Has a defined scope;
• Has long-term stability;
• Produces materials that serve some University mission (research, teaching, administration, etc);
• Can assume responsibility for setting community policies.

VU e-Archive communities need not mirror the existing University organizational structure. Any faculty member (including non-tenure track and visiting faculty), and any representative of any administrative or other academic organizational unit on campus should be allowed to propose a VU e-Archive community. Groups wishing to establish a VU e-Archive community that does not conform to this definition will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

A VU e-Archive collection is a sub-unit of a community designed to contain materials with some characteristic in common, such as departmental working papers, issues of a newsletter, preprints, committee minutes, etc. Individual faculty members may submit items to collections through an established community in the VU e-Archive. An individual may belong to more than one community.

VU e-Archive communities will take responsibility for defining their membership and submitting content. Once a community has been established within the policy guidelines, the library will provide assistance as needed, however the library will not directly supervise communities’ use of the VU e-Archive. Communities will be responsible for reviewing material submitted for permanent retention and display prior to storage. Once in the VU e-Archive, materials will not be removed or modified unless forced by legal issues.

For the VU e-Archive, the library will:

• Encourage leaders of campus units to participate;
• Work with groups to establish and organize their communities and collections;
• Train community members to add materials;
• Review and edit metadata (i.e., descriptive information);
• Preserve materials added;
• Not take on the role of editor or censor;
• Maintain the content, software, and hardware.

The goal is for the VU e-Archive to be both a scholarly and an archival resource. A balance between scholarly and archival materials is desirable, however the aim is to build the VU e-Archive to meet faculty, student, and staff needs for broad access and long-term preservation of their digital materials. Research material, data, working papers, books, pre- and post-prints, supporting materials, and learning objects are highly sought. Minutes, newsletters, publicity documents, and other archival materials that showcase the university, its centers, departments, or committees, or its history and development are also desirable. Each community may include either or both types of materials within its various collections. The library maintains a list of formats that it will support within the VU e-Archive pages. This list will be updated as the technology changes or evolves.

As the library solicits participation in the VU e-Archive by various communities across campus, efforts will focus on trans-institutional centers, departments, and faculty to represent a wide range of disciplines. In addition to soliciting communities, the library will establish communities as they contact us, responding to any group that is willing to participate and meets the criteria for establishment as a community.