BCIT Library installed an Institutional Repository platform in April 2013, now named the BCIT Institutional Repository. This repository is a place to bring together scholarly work, historic materials, published works, student projects and research from the BCIT Community and to collaborate on the growing body of research, and serve public materials to the wider world via Open Access.
Anyone at BCIT may contribute to the BCIT Institutional Repository. Please contact cmclellan13@bcit.ca if you are interested in submitting to the BCIT institutional repository.
BCIT cIRcuit
BC Government is moving ahead with two initiatives for post-secondary, school and public libraries as part of Core Review to expand access and shared services. This opportunity builds on the shared services initiatives already underway in the education and post-secondary education sectors. It takes a cross-sector shared services approach for libraries, which will also result in expanded public access to information and resources and greater co-ordination and efficiencies across the three sectors.
A new Provincial Digital Library will expand access to academic research and openly licensed library resources. The first phase of the digital library will allow anytime, anywhere access to research created at B.C. post-secondary institutions, while the second phase will expand access to openly licensed resources across academic, school and public libraries.
Next steps will be working with stakeholders to build on the collaborative nature of the sector to identify opportunities for shared services such as shared procurement, licensing and co-ordinated training and technical support. Avoided costs across the two library initiatives are estimated at between $1 million and $2 million.
The BCIT Library is currently working with BC ELN (The British Columbia Electronic Library Network is a partnership between the Province of British Columbia and its post-secondary libraries, and they are administering the delivery of a business case for the Provincial Digital Library) to participate in the provincial Institutional Repository.
A Provincial Digital Library will help support the requirements of federal funded (CIHR) research and project papers to be freely accessible through an online repository within 12 months of publication. Modeled after CIHR’s policy, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) are beginning a consultation with their communities on a Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy.
BCIT Library currently has a platform for Digital Collections online (which runs on ContentPro IRX software), we can satisfy the freely accessible open access repository requirements with this platform, and we can also contribute our data to other portals or digital repositories including through metadata harvesting.
The BCIT Library has also made strides into establishing a workflow for a collaborative digital scholarly repository, including creation of a non-exclusive license to host student and faculty papers and projects. The Sustainability Repository is an inter-departmental project that prototyped the use of BCIT created materials accessible digitally for teaching.
BCIT Institutional Repository: https://circuit.bcit.ca/repository/islandora/object/repository%3Aroot
