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MINDS@UW: Preserving and sharing digital materials

Wednesday, February 06, 2008


As the academy becomes increasingly digital, the task of preserving scholarly output and making it widely accessible takes on a new meaning.

MINDS@UW has become a useful way to gather, preserve and distribute scholarly content in digital form. Faculty and staff can easily upload research papers and reports, datasets and other primary research materials, learning objects, videos, theses, student projects, conference papers and presentations, and other research and instructional materials.

"Faculty of all generations are straddling the analog-digital divide and will do so for most of their careers," says Dorothea Salo, Digital Repository Librarian for the University. "Materials destined for print are often born digital, and not all scholarship can be reduced to words and graphs on a printed page."

Minds at UW logoMINDS@UW can make this content available on the Web as a searchable, digital collection of materials - from paper and digital sources - submitted by faculty and staff from UW campuses across the state. Users can browse collections in this digital content repository and use keywords to find specific items.

"This is about more than preservation," says Salo. "MINDS@UW provides open access to content. It makes no sense to lock up this knowledge."

The resource has grown from about 2,000 items to more than 6,000 this year. Most of the traffic to the MINDS@UW Web site (minds.wisconsin.edu) comes from search engines such as Google, Salo says.

The MINDS@UW resource now includes such items as:

  • The collection of Alan Corré, a retired professor of Religious Studies at UW-Milwaukee. "An incredible amount of material," says Salo, including book-length translations and grammars of pidgin languages. Concerned that his scholarly resource would disappear after his retirement, Corré worked with Salo to preserve it and keep it accessible online.
  • A substantial collection of digitized UW-Madison theses and dissertations, scanned by Wisconsin Library Service during the normal interlibrary loan process.
  • A collection of publisher's editions of scholarly papers captured through BibApp, an online tool developed by Eric Larson of Wendt Library to create an institutional bibliography. BibApp helps capture the text and check publishers' archiving policies and then feeds the content to MINDS@UW.

This spring, Prof. Andrew Kersten of UW-Green Bay will create an archive of World War One veterans' histories first collected in the 1920s and make it available via MINDS@UW. Departments, research centers, and other campus units interested in preserving and providing access to their digital materials can use MINDS@UW. "You can be set up to upload content to MINDS@UW in 10 minutes or less," Salo explains. "If you can shop on Amazon, you can add material to MINDS@UW."

MINDS@UW was developed jointly by UW-Madison Libraries and DoIT. To learn more about the program, see uwdcc.library.wisc.edu/minds or contact Dorothea Salo at dsalo@library.wisc.edu