Huskie Commons - Institutional Repository

Introduction

Mission

The purpose of Northern Illinois University’s institutional repository, Huskie Commons, is to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital versions of the scholarly and artistic works created by the faculty, staff, and students of Northern Illinois University. The repository is administered and stewarded by the University Libraries, which has ultimate responsibility for determining policy and practice.

Audience

NIU faculty members, staff, graduate students, undergraduate students (with faculty sponsorship), University organizations, and University administrative units are the primary audience and may contribute materials to Huskie Commons.

Criteria for Inclusion

Scope of Content

Huskie Commons collects a broad assortment of copyright-compliant versions of scholarly and artistic works produced by members of the NIU community and materials that primarily reflect the intellectual environment of the campus. Examples of the types of work acceptable for deposit include: published journal articles, pre-prints, post-prints, conference papers, dissertations, theses, capstones, honors projects, working papers, technical reports, data sets, learning objects, open access journals published by the NIU community, and creative works.

Limitations

Materials may not be appropriate for inclusion in Huskie Commons for the following reasons: 

• Materials for which no author has an NIU affiliation.
• Materials in a file format that cannot be deposited due to technical reasons.
• Materials of a prohibitive size (i.e. terabytes).
• Materials that may have copyright issues, e.g. may violate a publisher's copyright agreement with an author.

Copyright Status of Materials

Content in Huskie Commons constitutes a digital instance based on permissions granted to the Libraries to preserve and make relevant resources available. This permission does not extend to other entities. Beyond the implicit right to read the content or download or print a copy for personal use, re-use rights vary based on the permissions granted by rights holders. See the Rights and Permissions Policy for current guidelines.

Maintenance and Removal

Materials contained within Huskie Commons are not intended for removal except in keeping with internal deaccessioning policies. Once accepted for inclusion, materials added to Huskie Commons will be considered a permanent part of the collection.

Under certain circumstances, an item in Huskie Commons may need to be deaccessioned. Deaccessioning is an active collection management tool that allows the University Libraries to refine, focus, and improve its collections. Digital files are subject to the same deaccessioning policies as other materials in the Libraries’ collections. If all or part of a collection is deaccessioned, it will be deleted from the repository. Generally, all digital objects will remain as accessible as possible, but removal may occur for reasons of collection weeding, storage issues, data curation, or security concerns. All deaccession decisions must comply with legal and ethical standards and reflect the University’s role as a trustee of the materials in its collections for the benefit of the campus community, researchers, and the public. Deaccession criteria is detailed in Appendix 1.

The final decision for deaccession of materials in Huskie Commons will remain with the Digital Collections Steering Committee.

Deposit agreement requirements and responsibilities

The University Libraries reserve the right to deaccession assets or collections on a case-by-case basis, with due observance of institutional and contractual obligations. Collection managers can deaccession objects from the digital archive as part of a responsible collection management decision.

Accessibility

The University Libraries are committed to making its digital assets as accessible as possible. This commitment includes:

• Web design that complies with section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and internal standards set by NIU.
• Digital objects and metadata available through commonly and freely available standards.
• The highest quality file for all digitized objects in Huskie Commons will be made as openly available as possible.

If portions of any site are inaccessible, please contact us.

Review Cycle

This policy was approved on October 26, 2017. It will be reviewed annually, or as needed, by the Digital Collections Steering Committee to assure timely revisions as technology progresses, strategies and experiences mature, and resources change.

Appendix 1: Deaccession Criteria 

The Digital Collections Steering Committee will evaluate all deaccession proposals on a case-by-case basis and in accordance with the statutory provisions quoted above. Each item being considered for deaccession must meet at least one of the following criteria:

• Relevance: inclusion of the asset in the collection does not support Huskie Common’s mission or fit within the collection development policy.
• Care of the Object: care cannot not be provided for assets in unsupported formats or Huskie Commons lacks resources to cover special preservation requirements associated with an asset.
• Duplication: the asset is an exact duplicate or unnecessarily duplicates the subject matter or relevance of another asset within the collection.
• Authenticity: the asset lacks historical value or usefulness for any of the following reasons:
  • Integrity
  • Authenticity
  • Identity
  • provenance
• Access: the asset cannot be rendered or presented because of advanced deterioration (e.g. bit rot), obsolescence, or because the item has been migrated to a standard format or a format that equally or better represents the item. ● Rights: Huskie Commons staff received a request to remove the asset from the copyright holder.
• Privacy: the asset includes personal information such as SSNs, phone numbers, addresses, etc.
• Sustainability: the asset is available in another Trusted Digital Repository.
• Security: the asset is found to be malicious in nature and/or potentially damaging to other items in the collection.