Digital Commons @ HU: Info for Liaisons

Who is a Digital Commons liaison?

Each program lead is responsible for appointing at least one faculty member to be the program's liaison for Digital Commons. The program lead can be the Digital Commons liaison. This liaison will be given admin access to certain pages of Digital Commons and will receive training in how to manage their program's materials on Digital Commons.

What are the Digital Commons liaison's responsibilities?

• Maintain program pages
• Upload theses, dissertations, projects, and other exceptional student work
• Manage student and faculty submissions
• Maintain open dialogue with the Library about Digital Commons

Recommended Practices

Which theses and dissertations should be submitted to Digital Commons?

Ideally, the HU Digital Commons Institutional Repository will provide a record of all scholarship produced at HU. Digital Commons not only showcases student work at HU and promotes the dissemination of research conducted at HU, but it is also the central archive for all theses and dissertations to be used referentially by faculty, staff, and students. 

Theses and Dissertations should include:

• Title
• Abstract
• Date of acceptance (year is required, but be as specific as possible)
• Faculty advisor(s)
• Keywords

If you would like to discuss any of the recommended practices, please contact the library.

• Phone: (717) 901-5188
• Email: Library@HarrisburgU.edu

View the training materials below to learn how to manage Digital Commons. Click here to go directly to the playlist in YouTube.

By default, the following options have not been implemented. These options can be used on an individual document basis. If you would like to implement any of these options for an entire program, contact the library.

Embargoes

Embargoes ensure that a document is not accessible for a set period of time. 

Creative Commons Licensing

Publishing a work with a Creative Commons license allows a work to be open access. To learn more about what "Creative Commons" means and about the various licenses, visit the Info for Authors page.

Q: Do I need to create my own Digital Commons account?
A: Yes. You MUST use your HU email address to create your account. If you do not yet have administrative privileges for the pages you are supposed to manage, please contact a librarian. For more information about logging in to your account, visit the Bepress website.

Q: Can I tailor the program pages?
A: Yes. The only items that MUST be included on the program pages are the program name, a brief description of the program, and a brief statement about criteria for accepted documents on the page. The default description of the program is taken directly from the 2017-2018 catalogs, but you may edit the description to say something different if you want.

Q: Can I add/delete the default disciplines?
A: Yes. See a full list of available disciplines in Digital Commons. Please see the training video about how you can add or delete the default disciplines available when a document is submitted.

Q: Can I change the metadata fields on the submission page for my program?
A: Yes. See a full list of available metadata fields available in Digital Commons. Please contact the library about which metadata fields you would like to be required and optional.

Q: Does Digital Commons use TurnItIn or another plagiarism checker?
A: No, this is not currently a feature of Digital Commons. It's considered the responsibility of the program to complete a due diligence check for plagiarism before posting any work. One way to achieve this is to have students first submit their work through Canvas and use the TurnItIn plagiarism checker integrated into our Canvas instance.