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MINDS@UW: share and preserve material

Wednesday, May 04, 2005


MINDS@UW: A new way to share and preserve digital materials

Worried that your floppy disks won't stand the test of time and looking to make your work available to a wider audience? MINDS@UW might be your solution.

MINDS@UW is a digital content repository developed jointly by UW-Madison Libraries and DoIT. Their goal was to create a searchable, digital collection of materials submitted by faculty and staff from UW campuses across the state at minds.wisconsin.edu MINDS@UW houses material in a variety of digital formats from a growing array of academic disciplines. “The repository exists to preserve important information in digital form,” says Lisa Saywell, Digital Repository Librarian with the UW's Digital Collections Center. “At the same time, the Web interface makes it easy for users to access the information regardless of their location,” she adds.

A growing number of departments at UW-Madison are adding material into specific “communities” within the repository, including research papers, pre-prints, datasets, photographs, videos and learning objects. The Wisconsin Transportation Center at the College of Engineering, for example, intends to place formerly unpublished technical reports and presentations online. The Women's Studies Consortium, a program of the UW System, hopes to use MINDS@UW to store newsletters, policy papers, presentations and items documenting the evolution of their program. The repository is now being explores as a way to provide access to masters theses in digital form.

Departments, research centers, and other campus units interested in preserving and providing access to their digital materials are encouraged to participate in the MINDS@UW project. The content is made available on the Web, enabling users to browse collections or use keywords to find specific items. Other universities such as MIT, Cornell, Columbia, and Ohio State are also building similar repositories.

To learn more about the program, see minds.wisconsin.edu or contact Lisa Saywell at lsaywell@libraries.wisc.edu.