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Program Sigma is a collaborative effort between the University Libraries, Information Technologies (I-Tech) and Digital Library Technologies. Sigma will define, specify, create and implement publishing and curation services that are supported by repository infrastructure. These services encompass a wide range of activity, including outreach, consultation, policy development, training, content stewardship, and technology. These services will be implemented throughout 2011-12 and will be marketed as a cohesive suite by Fall 2012.
With Andrea Harrington serving as Program Manager, Sigma membership consists of the following:
Marcy Bidney, Linda Friend, Mike Furlough, Lisa German, Mike Giarlo, Beth Hayes, Patricia Hswe, Linda Klimczyk, Christy Long, Mairéad Martin, and Tim Pyatt.
Members of Program Sigma will provide updates through upcoming brown bags (listed below), short pieces in the Libraries' InterView newsletter, and blog posts at "Content Stewardship @ Penn State."
All Program Sigma brown bags will be in Mann Assembly, 12-1 PM:
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Develop workflow for acquiring, hosting, and providing online access to born-digital, purchased data sets
Distribution of, and access to, student work, including theses and dissertations that are outside the Graduate School and Schreyer Honors College ETD programs, which the Libraries already sponsor
Provide discovery and access to Penn State research that has been undiscoverable
Penn State programs that generate masters papers, honors theses, and dissertations that are not affiliated with the Graduate School or Schreyer Honors College
Text-based content (e.g., student capstone papers, faculty dissertations) that the Libraries are currently not collecting, or publishing
Research community both at Penn State and at large
Online publication of posters and supplementary materials featured in exhibitions of graduate and undergarduate researchScope
Define journal publishing services that the University Libraries could provide; develop human and technology components to support these services as required
Service could support disciplines, students and researchers who need both advice and an effective way to publish journals and similar works
Penn State research community. Interested in various products including student journals.
Penn State's ScholarSphere is a new research repository service offered by the University Libraries and Information Technology Services, enabling Penn State faculty, staff, and students to share their scholarly works such as research datasets, working papers, research reports, and image collections, to name a few examples. ScholarSphere will make these works more discoverable, accessible, usable, and thus broadly recognized and known.
The ScholarSphere service will help researchers actively manage stored versions of their research and preserve it, ensuring its longevity over time for future generations of scholars to find, use, and build on. The preservation functions include scheduled and on-demand verifications of deposited works, characterization of files to mitigate future format obsolescence, regular file backups, and replication to disaster recovery sites.
A trusted institutional service, ScholarSphere has safeguards in place for keeping private research secure and unchanged over time, as researchers warrant, as well as for keeping access restricted to the individual researcher.
Questions about ScholarSphere? Please contact the project team: DLT-GAMMA-PROJECT@lists.psu.edu
The part of Program Sigma that will be designing and developing a repository services platform will engage stakeholders on a weekly basis. Each week the development team will show stakeholders the latest iteration of the platform, and stakeholders will provide their feedback, making suggestions for improvements and thereby informing the next iteration.
The stakeholders for the repository services piece of Program Sigma, listed below, are primarily liaison librarians. They are offering use cases that will help ensure the resulting platform is relevant to them as well as to the faculty and students we all serve. Their close ties to faculty and students will also be important to draw upon during the testing phase.
This blog post describes our stakeholder process: "A Start on Getting at Services Our Users Want"
Participating stakeholders are listed below:
Use cases are pivotal to the development of repository-based services in Program Sigma. By "use case," we mean the service inquiries that Scholarly Communications Services and Digital Curation Services have consulted on, with both library and teaching faculty and with graduate students, over the last couple of years.
Participants at the Publishing and Curation Services Retreat in August 2011 saw this table of service inquiries (PDF) . These are serving as our use cases for Program Sigma. We are mindful that this table represents only a portion of what our users inquire about. We invite you to take a look and to let us know what isn't there, that should be there. Please contact Linda Friend, or Patricia Hswe, and share your ideas.
(blog about stewardship services and activities at Penn State)
