About Institutional Repositories

Digital Commons @ Otterbein is an institutional repository of a collection of digital materials that captures and preserves the intellectual output of the university community. The Digital Commons responds to two strategic issues facing Otterbein:

  • provides a central component of a readily accessible depository for selected archival material, video and still images, current news and events, procedural and policy guidelines, and other information that benefits the university community and other public users;
  • and serves as a tangible indicator of Otterbein's quality, thus increasing its visibility, prestige, and public value.

The mission of the Digital Commons @ Otterbein is to advance scholarship, promote research and cross-disciplinary collaboration through the dissemination and preservation of research, instructional and creative digital materials created by the Otterbein community, and sustain the historical legacy of Otterbein University.

Among the goals:

  • To raise the visibility and prestige of Otterbein University by showcasing the University’s research output, publications, and creative works online and to showcase the institution to interested constituencies, including prospective students, prospective staff, and other stakeholders
  • To provide persistent and centralized access to research and scholarly activities at Otterbein, with the aim to preserve and provide a long-term home to that research and scholarship
  • To foster cross-disciplinary scholarly collaborations to further the teaching and service missions of Otterbein University by making the scholarship and research assets readily accessible
  • To facilitate the development and sharing of digital teaching materials and aids
  • To manage and measure research and teaching activities
  • To support student endeavors, providing access to theses, dissertations, and tools for journal publication, conference presentation, management, etc.
  • To capture the university records for the purposes of preservation and to improve the efficiency of organizational operations for activities like accreditations and assessments
  • To provide a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services, and research tools that enable departments, research units, and individual scholars associated with Otterbein University to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.
  • To document and record Otterbein’s history and progress online

The Digital Commons @ Otterbein supports

  • Institutional self-publishing, including faculty or student journals, conference proceedings, article reprints, art galleries, video productions, and lectures.
  • Institutional archives, including reports, minutes and colloquia.
  • Student scholarship, including honors and distinction projects, theses, and journals.
  • Faculty scholarship through both institutional catalogs of the faculty work and individual, consistently designed, search-engine-optimized, accessible space in which a faculty member can control their own showcase within an Otterbein-branded environment.
  • Institutional events such as symposia, Honors Reporting Day, and convocations with both internal event management, such as paper judging, as well as external audience presentation.
  • Collections of data and documents for institutional evaluation, including accreditation and for (controlled) access to research data as required by many granting agencies.

Statement of Responsibility

The “Institutional Repository Subcommittee” is responsible for guiding the direction of the repository (Digital Commons @ Otterbein), which will include, but is not limited to: content, policies, implementation, strategies, and the assessment & review process of the IR. Significant new projects need to be approved by the Subcommittee, especially those that will require additional staff time, storage space, emerging formats, or digitization.

The librarian liaisons are responsible for communicating the purpose of Digital Commons @ Otterbein to the Otterbein University community and recruiting material for inclusion. Librarian liaisons are also responsible for educating our users about the requirements of copyright law, making it clear that submissions must comply with current copyright guidelines.

Faculty may recommend material for inclusion to their representative librarian liaison. University employees and students should direct their requests to submit materials to the appropriate department head or faculty member, who, in turn, will make the recommendation to their librarian liaison or the repository administrator atdigitalcommons07@otterbein.edu .

Librarians will assume the responsibility of rights-checking, seeking permissions, submitting, and posting materials to the IR. A self-submission service will be made available in the future, enabling faculty and staff to submit materials directly to the IR.  All correspondence regarding the repository should be sent to either the appropriate library liaison OR the repository administrator at digitalcommons07@otterbein.edu

For more information about Digitalcommons@Otterbein, please visit our Libguide page.