The Library and ITS have been working this past year to update and improve Wesleyan’s institutional repository, WesScholar. WesScholar is where Wesleyan’s undergraduate honors theses, masters theses, and doctoral dissertations along with faculty produced scholarly and creative outputs are housed.
Our work has been guided by the following goals:
- add new features
- improve ease of use and access
- improve the services we provide in regards to digital scholarship to faculty, staff, and students on campus.
Last fall the task force in charge of updating WesScholar asked faculty for feedback on improvements to the infrastructure and services. We’re now ready to report back to you on some changes that are currently underway, based in part on this feedback.
Moving forward we will use the name “WesScholar” to refer to a suite of services and platforms intended to support Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff in sharing and storing their research data and other scholarly and creative outputs. We’ve started to develop the new web presence for WesScholar where we will post services, guidelines, and how-tos. You can see more details here: https://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/howdoi/wesscholarabout.html
We have chosen two new platforms for publishing and sharing your research data and other scholarly and creative output. These are Islandora, for digital collections, and figshare, our new data repository.
We are in the process of moving content from our old institutional repository platform, bepress, to our new platform, Islandora. Every week we move more content and you can check in on our progress here. https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu
As a part of the migration we are adding DOIs (a unique alphanumeric string that acts as a URL and is assigned to your research data, scholarly or creative output) to records for objects that already have them and minting DOIs for our electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).
To aid in migration, we are holding a moratorium beginning March 31, 2020 on uploading new content. We will be back in touch once migration is complete with information on how to self-submit your work and how to get assistance.