OSU’s Knowledge Bank – Preserving Ohio State’s Digital Intellectual Output

What is the KB?

The Knowledge Bank (KB) is OSU’s digital institutional repository, and is a joint venture of the University Libraries and the Office of the Chief Information Officer. The purpose of the KB is to preserve the digital intellectual output of the university and make it accessible online. The KB is built on DSpace, a widely used open source repository platform. The Libraries’ Web Implementation Team provides technical support for the KB and contributes to the ongoing development of DSpace. The Libraries’ Scholarly Resource Integration Department promotes the repository, recruits content, and sets standards for organization, description, and display of items in the KB.

Types of content in the KB include faculty and student research, working papers, lectures and conferences, digitized library collections, and organizational records. The vast majority of the content in the KB is open access, meaning it is freely available online to anyone. Some items are embargoed, meaning they are unavailable for a specified length of time, at the end of which they become open access. Embargoes are requested when the author wants the option to publish the content for the first time elsewhere (e.g. undergraduate honors theses), or when the publisher has requested a delay to give them time to recoup costs by selling copies (e.g. OSU Press books). Embargoes in the KB typically last one, three, or five years.

How does it work?

The KB is organized into communities, which can be colleges or departments, centers and programs, or individual collections or publications. Communities are divided into sub-communities and collections, with the content entered as items. An item consists of metadata, or descriptive information, and one or more files. Although the KB team helps the communities with organization and description, the type of content that is appropriate for a collection is determined by the community itself. Permission to submit to a collection is granted individually. Some communities have a designated submitter who enters content, some rely on the KB team to submit items for them, and some set up a process where the individual authors submit their own work (for example, undergraduate honors theses).

Can items in the KB be changed after they are submitted?

Except in very rare cases, items once submitted to the KB cannot be removed, replaced, or changed. The purpose of having such a policy is to ensure that the content in the KB is stable and permanent, and can be cited with confidence that it will be the same in the future. One of the goals of the KB is long-term preservation of digital content, so all items receive a permanent URL, and will be migrated to new formats and new software platforms as necessary to make them accessible in the future.

What other services are available?

The KB repository is part of a suite of scholarly communication services offered by the Libraries. The KB team also runs an open access journal and conference publishing program, and works closely with the Libraries’ Copyright Help Center, which offers information and educational programming about copyright issues. Our overall goal is to support the university’s faculty and students in their research and publishing endeavors, and to contribute to the transformation of the scholarly communication environment towards openness and accessibility.

For more information contact libkbhelp@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu.