DiscoverArchive: System Engineering Management Project

Abstract

DiscoverArchive within Vanderbilt University’s Library system currently exists in a very basic implementation that does not necessarily encourage the fundamental purpose of the archive. This purpose is to gather and publish to a common, openly accessible online database any and all faculty and student generated research produced at Vanderbilt University. The intent of this database is to allow anyone free access to the knowledge produced in this academic and research driven environment in an effort to further the combined knowledge of the academic world. While the aims of the system are in accordance with the founding principles of the open access movement, the reality is that the current implementation of the system is far too rudimentary to handle the volume of data that would be generated by a University wide mandate to publish to the database. In its current state, the archive relies almost entirely on the efforts of Ronee Francis, Manager of Digital Archives at Vanderbilt, to go out and search for research documents and professors to include in the archive. Once she finds a viable document, she contacts both author and publisher to obtain permissions to add it to the archive, and if those are granted she fills out a non-exclusive Vanderbilt license that is uploaded to the archive along with the PDF of the document. If documents do not exist in digital form they must first be scanned by library staff. It is easy to see that this existing methodology can only handle so much data because of the amount of time that the few people involved must spend preparing each document.