Digital Commons at RISD: Building Communities While Presenting Legacy

Rhode Island School of Design launched its Digital Commons institutional repository in 2015 following a multi-year period of research and investigation with digital content already administered by the Fleet Library. The two years since then have led to uploading nearly four thousand items from stakeholder offices and departments including the school’s strategic plan, commencement addresses, and other speakers and symposia as well as unforeseeable developments such as ephemera from a Cabaret performance-based class (offered 1987-2000) and a faculty-edited journal. Along the way, Digital Commons @ RISD has been presented at faculty meetings, to the school’s Board of Trustees, and stands to contribute to faculty promotion and tenure dossiers while already landing the school into the top downloads for a handful of disciplines at any given time. This presentation will detail the considerations leading to Digital Commons @ RISD and the processes of identifying and building communities across the school, targeting and soliciting their content, digital workflows, content types for differing media, as well as copyright challenges while forcing a much-needed conversation for digital content access and preservation in general