Sycamore Scholars is a digital archive of scholarly works created by students, staff, and faculty
at Indiana State University. Sycamore Scholars began as a means to enable ISU graduate students to submit their theses and dissertations
electronically, but the repository can include journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, working papers, data sets,
tutorials, music, photographs, and other digital items.
Items in Sycamore Scholars are freely available via the Web and are indexed by and accessible through Web search engines. Unlike most web sites,
files within Sycamore Scholars are maintained for the long term. Items in Sycamore Scholars are assigned a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI),
similar to a URL, but more permanent. Also, ISU and DSpace are committed to making items accessible far into the future.
What software is used for Sycamore Scholars?
Sycamore Scholars uses DSpace software, which was developed jointly by MIT and Hewlett-Packard and is now freely available as open-source software.
DSpace provides tools for submitting, reviewing, indexing, searching, and archiving items in many different digital formats.
Do other universities have repositories like Sycamore Scholars?
Listed below are just a few of the universities that have established repositories using DSpace:
Who manages Sycamore Scholars?
The Indiana State Sycamore Scholars is a digital project of Cunningham Memorial Library. Sycamore Scholars is developed and maintained by ISU Digital
Repository Committee.
How do I find scholarly works deposited in Sycamore Scholars?
You can search Sycamore Scholars by keyword or browse through Communities or Collections by title, author, or date.
Instructions on using the search function are available by clicking on the Help link from any page.
Items in Sycamore Scholars will also be indexed by popular web search engines.
Contributing to Sycamore Scholars
Who can add content to Sycamore Scholars?
Any ISU faculty member or researcher,student, and staff can add content
to Sycamore Scholars. Content must be added to a community that exists,
or into a new community. Departments, Labs, Centers and other ISU
units can also establish communities in DSpace. See What
is a Sycamore Scholars Community for more information.
What kind of content
can I add to Sycamore Scholars?
Sycamore Scholars accepts all manner of digital
formats. Here are some examples:
Documents, such as articles, preprints, working papers, technical
reports, or conference presentations
Books
Theses
Data sets
Artifacts
Artifacts
Maps
Specimens
Images
Audio files
Video files
Leture Notes
What kind of file formats
can I add to Sycamore Scholars?
Sycamore Scholars accepts many kinds of digital
formats.
For more information about file formats, see Sycamore Scholars Supported Formats on .
How can I deposit my work into Sycamore Scholars?
Before you can submit items, a "collection" needs to be established to receive your work. Please contact Lucy Wang, Digital and Archive Services, Cunningham Memorial Library,650 Sycamore Street, Terre Haute, IN 47809 , 812-237-3052,
contact us. Members of Digital Repository Committee are
available to meet with your department to demonstrate Sycamore Scholars and discuss it's benefits.
After a collection is set up, you can go to Sycamore Scholars register first,then log in and submit to your collection. Adding items is a simple, online, fill-in-the-blanks process.
Items you submit are reviewed and optimized for discoverability before being archived in Sycamore Scholars.
Can I deposit an article that has been published in a journal?
Probably. Even if you transferred copyright to the publisher, most publishers allow you to deposit
a copy of the article in a repository such as Sycamore Scholars. Many publishers stipulate that you must use your reviewed, revised manuscript
and not the formatted version that appeared in the journal. When you submit your work to Sycamore Scholars, the library will verify the publisher's
policy and contact you if there are any questions.
I'm an ISU alum. How can I get
my thesis added to Sycamore Scholars?
If you are a recent ISU graduate and have access to the
file that your paper thesis was printed from, you can convert
this file to PDF and send it to the ISU library to add to Sycamore Scholars.
You may also request that the ISU library scan your thesis and
add it to Sycamore Scholars. Scanning of paper theses is completed
on a cost recovery basis.
What if I have a co-author who isn't affiliated with ISU? Can I still deposit the work?
As long as your co-author does not object to depositing the work in the Sycamore Scholars, only one author needs
to be affiliated with ISU. It is also acceptable to deposit a work into more than one institutional repository.
For example, you could deposit the work in the Indiana State Sycamore Scholars and your co-author could deposit it into his or
her institutional repository.
I have only print copies of my articles. How can I add them to Sycamore Scholars?
Print materials can be scanned and the files submitted to Sycamore Scholars.
Copyright
What is a Deposit License in Sycamore Scholars?
When you submit content to Sycamore Scholars, you click through a Deposit
License. This is a contract between you and ISU, allowing
ISU to distribute and preserve your work. No copyright transfer
is involved.
What rights do I give up when I deposit a work into Sycamore Scholars?
You do not give up your copyright or any other rights when you place an item in Sycamore Scholars.
The Deposit licensing agreement for Sycamore Scholars asks only for non-exclusive rights to s
tore your work, preserve it, and make it available on the web. "Non-exclusive" means that you retain
all rights to your work and can sign agreements with other organizations to publish your work.
What copyright do I own?
All work set down in a tangible form is automatically
protected by U.S.
Copyright Law. When you distribute
a previously unpublished work in Sycamore Scholars, that work is immediately
covered by copyright. Copyright restricts the use of works by others
unless the user explicitly asks for permission to use your content.
If your work has previously been published, you may no longer
hold the copyright to your work and may therefore have limited
options regarding electronic distribution of that work. Publishers’ policies
differ on this point. Some publishers do allow re-distribution
via digital repositories.
Do I retain the copyright to my work
in Sycamore Scholars?
Yes, Sycamore Scholars does not require you to give your copyright, as
some publishers do. We only require that you agree to the Sycamore Scholars
Deposit License.
Preservation
How does Sycamore Scholars preserve digital material?
Sycamore Scholars identifies two levels of digital preservation: bit preservation,
and functional preservation. Bit preservation ensures that a
file remains exactly the same over time – not a single
bit is changed – while the physical media evolve around
it. Functional preservation goes further: the file does change
over time so that the material continues to be immediately usable
in the same way it was originally while the digital formats (and
the physical media) evolve over time. Some file formats can be
functionally preserved using straightforward format migration
(e.g., TIFF images or XML documents). Other formats are proprietary,
or for other reasons are much harder to preserve functionally.
At ISU, for the time being, we acknowledge the fact we cannot
predict or control the formats in which faculty and researchers
create their research materials. Faculty use the tools that are
best for their purposes, and we will get whatever formats those
tools produce. Because of this we’ve defined three levels
of preservation for a given format: supported, known, or unsupported.
Supported formats will be functionally preserved using either
format migration or emulation techniques.
Known formats are those that we can’t promise to preserve
(e.g., proprietary or binary formats) but which are so popular
that we believe third party migration tools will emerge to
help with format migration.
Unsupported formats are those that we don’t know enough
about to do any sort of functional preservation.
For all three levels we will do bit-level preservation so that “digital
archaeologists” of the future will have the raw material
to work with if the material proves to be worth that effort.
What sort of persistent identifiers does
Sycamore Scholars use?
Sycamore Scholars uses the Handle System from
CNRI to assign and resolve persistent identifiers for each and
every digital item. Handles are URN-compliant identifiers, and
the Handle resolver is an open-source system which is used in
conjunction with the Sycamore Scholars system.
Handles were chosen in preference to persistent URLs because
of the desire to support citations to items in Sycamore Scholars over very
long time spans – longer than we believe the HTTP protocol
will last. Handles in Sycamore Scholars are currently implemented as URLs,
but can also be modified to work with future protocols.
Sycamore
Scholars
