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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
| Benefit | Example |
|---|---|
| Discoverable | Metadata allows users to discover content through searching on a number of different aspects such as subject search, author/creator search, format search, etc. It also allows content contributors to track the content they or others have submitted, i.e. files related to a grant-funded project, or about a particular topic of interest. Metadata drives certain search functions of ScholarSphere, such as OpenSearch, permitting subscription to subject-driven RSS feeds publishing the latest ScholarSphere content based on specific metadata values. Indexing of ScholarSphere content by Google Scholar and other indexing services is also driven by metadata; the more metadata available to these services, the more likely it is that your content will be discovered by users. |
| Citable | Via stable, short URLs and metadata about research is immediately exportable to citation managers. ScholarSphere enables documentation and description of research data for optimal discovery and curation of data through their lifecycle of use and reuse. |
| Accessible | Ingested content may be assigned different levels of access such as full discovery, individual(s), and user managed groups. |
| Secure | 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 |
| Preserved | The preservation functions include scheduled and on-demand verifications of deposited works, and characterization of files to mitigate future format obsolescence. |
| Backed up | ScholarSphere provides regular file backups, and replication to disaster recovery sites. |
Usability testing is a standard practice used for testing applications before they are finalized and made available to the user community. Usability testing gives users the opportunity to use the application and provide feedback on the user interface and functionality. The ultimate goal is to deliver an application that is intuitive and easy to use.Test participants will be provided with a series of tasks and then asked to provide feedback on those tasks. Below are some example tasks:
In addition to scripted tasks, test participants will be encouraged to explore the site, ingest their own materials, add metadata, search for their materials, etc. While performing these tasks, feedback will be solicited and documented. If technical problems resulting in the application not performing correctly are reported, they will be fixed and followed by additional testing.
Anyone who has a Penn State access account (userid and password) can be a test user for ScholarSphere:
Yes. Using materials that you are familiar with will create a more accurate and realistic testing experience. A sample listing of test materials would include: research datasets, working papers, research reports, image collections, conference proceedings, poster exhibitions, etc.
NOTE: During testing, content uploaded to ScholarSphere will be publicly available (unless more restrictive access permissions are set), and content will be removed from ScholarSphere when testing concludes in early August.
Dates: July 10 - August 2
Sessions: Will run 1 1/2 hours (to provide time for testing and feedback)
Registrants: Each session is limited to 10 test participants. If you register for a session that is full, you will be placed on a wait list. If a seat becomes available, you will be moved from the wait list into that seat.
Location: 211 Davey Lab Instruction Room (Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library)
Use the following links to register:
