Repository Policies and Procedures
The Repository's purpose is to collect, record, provide access to, and archive the research and scholarship of Texas A&M University. The Repository contains digital works that reflect the intellectual and service environment of the campus.
The Repository will adhere to the university's Web Privacy Policy. Users of the Repository will adhere to TAMU Policies for computing.
The Repository uses DSpace software which supports a simple Community/Collection hierarchy.
As outlined below, the Texas A&M University Libraries offers submission services, and preservation services to support the users of the Repository.
1. Community Creation Services
For colleges, departments, research centers, or administrative and other campus groups interested in maintaining their own Community, Libraries staff will work with your staff to help create a new Community, as well as provide advice on metadata specific to your Community's needs and information on copyright issues.
When setting up a Community, the department or research center must identify a Community Administrator to be responsible for managing all aspects of the Community, including the Community's Collections, and if appropriate, Curators. The Collection guidelines and workflows will be discussed and negotiated. For more information on Collection requirements, see the Collections Policy.
2. Submission Services to Established Collections
The Repository offers an easy-to-use web based process for submitting digital works one by one to an established Collection. Once authorized to do so, faculty, staff, students, colleges, departments, research centers, administrative and other campus groups can submit their works to the appropriate Collections. See the Submission and Withdrawal Policy and submission guidelines for step-by-step instructions.
Batch loading is possible for a very large number of items. This requires programming expertise on the part of the submitter. Contact digitallibrary@tamu.edu for more information.
3. Access Services
The Repository is built with technology that assures the online stability of a work submitted to a Collection; making the citation to the work highly reliable and accessible.
Each work and the information about it (the metadata) will have a persistent URL so it can be easily cited by other researchers.
Works in the Repository will be indexed by Google / Google Scholar, other search engines, and OAI-PMH harvesters like OAIster making them more findable. Additionally the Repository has an RSS feed that can be incorporated into readers and other web applications, boosting accessibility to the works.
4. Preservation Services
The Repository will provide long-term access to submitted works, as well as associated descriptive and administrative metadata, by employing a strategy combining the following: secure backup, storage media refreshment and file format migration including possible migration to preferred formats during submission, and replication in geographically distributed archives.
At this time, the Repository is committed to preserving the bitstream (the binary form of the data). Further practical measures to preserve as much functionality (“look and feel”) of the original as possible will be employed as resources permit. See the Preservation Policy for more information.
All of these policies are accessible through the Repository: