[Dspace-general] communities and collections layout

[Pat Galloway]

Deborah,
Our departmental institutional repository is being run as an archives, 
containing born-digital materials (mostly) as well as use copies in 
accessible formats. We are especially interested in how the DSpace 
structure can be used to instantiate archival descriptive practice and 
are experimenting with where to apply descriptive elements. We are 
holding materials for our school, but we are also hosting temporarily 
other collections that are being processed as student projects. You may 
be interested especially in several collections of literary born-digital 
materials that we are hosting for the Harry Ransom Center here at UT: 
though you cannot due to copyright issues and HRC policy actually see 
the items, you can look at the community-subcommunity-collection 
structures that my students have made in mirroring the published or 
in-progress HRC finding aids for paper materials from the same 
collections (augmented where the born-digital has no paper analog). Look 
at https://pacer.ischool.utexas.edu/ and look under the Special Projects 
community. The Michael Joyce collection is especially fleshed out 
structurally (though the finding aid for paper collections is not yet 
complete, since in this case the paper is less important), but there are 
other collections for Arnold Wesker, Leon Uris, John Crowley, and Norman 
Mailer. To get a feeling for how the DSpace structure reflects the HRC's 
practice in creating archival finding aids, especially compare the 
Wesker finding aids here http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/
Pat Galloway
School of Information
University of Texas at Austin