Bridging the Gap Between Digital Measures and Digital Commons in Support of Open Access: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Human Mediation

Abstract

Utah State University is home to a Digital Commons repository and an instance of the Digital Measures activity-reporting tool. The prospect of linking these two systems, such that content is automatically harvested from Digital Measures for upload into the Digital Commons, is alluring. Our initial efforts were abandoned due to lack of faculty permissions and low-quality metadata. However, with the passage of an Institutional Open Access Policy, we resumed investigation. We found that the process of harvesting from Digital Measures and uploading to Digital Commons could be streamlined, if not fully automated. Our initial harvest revealed that human-mediation is desirable.