Digital Commons @ C.O.D.
The Library has just completed the first year of a pilot program to establish an institutional repository at the College of DuPage. Named Digital Commons@C.O.D., the repository is intended to be a tool used to collect, preserve, and showcase scholarly, educational, and creative works created by the C.O.D. community including faculty, staff, and students.
While still a pilot program, Digital Commons has already been used to archive over 500 various digital items that have been downloaded, in total, over 86,000 times. Items in the collection include research articles, book chapters, conference presentations, classroom projects, classroom video, promotional videos, audio commentary, images and mixed media artwork.
Digital Commons facilitates global discovery of and access to C.O.D.'s intellectual output by optimizing discovery of items through web search results in search engines such as Google. When a work is added to Digital Commons, it is ranked highly in relevant search engine results, which gives C.O.D. a higher profile in the global academic world. As well as optimizing works for discovery in search engines, Digital Commons provides a centralized and easily browsable website that showcases, in a single location, the quality and quantity of the College’s intellectual and creative output. In essence, Digital Commons brings the College’s intellectual and creative works out into the open and allows the world and the local community to discover the amazing work being done at C.O.D.
The next year of the pilot will continue the work of the first year as well as focus on promoting Digital Commons to more faculty (both full-time and adjunct). Additionally, we will submit a grant proposal to digitize archival issues of the Courier newspaper for inclusion in Digital Commons as well as working with other campus organizations to add institutional documents to the repository. We will also work on adding more multimedia to collection as well as virtual learning objects. And we will continue to promote the overall benefits of Digital Commons as a tool the preserve and promote the work of the C.O.D. community.
Example Items
- Research articles
- Conference presentations
- Book chapters
- Class projects
- Audio commentary
- Promotional videos
- Honor student research
- Images
- E-books
- College publications (Prairie Light Review, Essai)
