Something Old, Something New , Something Bold, Something Cool: A Marriage of Two Repositories

For the past several years, many libraries have been developing institutional repositories to house their open access publishing efforts to both showcase and preserve their faculty’s research. Some of those same libraries have been building sizable digital collections, often built from digitized versions of materials in their special collections. So what happens when you put these two groups together? The University of South Florida Tampa Library did exactly that by creating a new Digital Scholarship Services unit. The union of these two groups has created new synergies between staff in complementary areas of the library, as we combine unique skill sets from each group to offer new services to the faculty. This presentation will discuss why this change was made, examine some of the benefits and growing pains of this change, and showcase some of the unusual projects that have resulted. For example, a group of faculty from the College of Education has a multimodal project featuring new methodological approaches for analyzing various formats such as websites, images, and film. The library also has two research associates who are archaeologists creating three dimensional representations of artifacts for cultural heritage preservation that are now embedded with metadata in the repository. Creating such collections not only highlights the university’s work but provides materials professors can use to enhance their course curricula and use technology to engage students in new and innovative ways