General Guidelines

The Academic Commons is designed for academic materials that require long-term access and preservation. It is not designed to meet short-term personal, classroom, or group needs. Please contact the Academic Commons Coordinator if you wonder whether the Academic Commons is the right place for your documents, images, media, or data.

Who can submit

All University faculty and staff are eligible to submit materials that are consistent with the Academic Commons collection policy. Students or student organizations may contribute materials that have been vetted and submitted by an authorized faculty or staff member. Students are also encouraged to submit their theses to the departmental theses collections.

How to get started

Identify your audience, the materials you want to become part of the Academic Commons, special requirements for your collection, and the amount of time you or your department can invest in maintaining the collection.

Contact the Academic Commons Coordinator to discuss your collection. If the Academic Commons is right for your needs, the process of creating your Academic Commons collection can begin immediately.

Steps in creating a collection

In most cases, your materials will become part of a Community Collection. Community Collections support a number of submission options. You may define who can submit, whether submissions are reviewed and by whom, as well as metadata fields that you will use to describe items for easy retrieval. Members of the Academic Commons staff will guide you through the process. For a more complete description of these procedures, see detailed steps in creating a departmental collection.

When materials are incorporated into a University Collection, a staff member from the library, archives, or museum will work with you to develop a project plan. University Collections are created at the discretion of these units.

Adding content to your collection

Materials are added to collections through a customized, step-by-step process. In many cases, a single person is designated to submit material for a department. Alternately, multiple individuals within a department may contribute to the collection, with optional review of these submissions by a single collection manager.

Academic Commons support staff will help you learn submit content to your collection. In some cases, the submission process will require a significant degree consistency and attention to detail. In other cases, item submission will follow to "best practices" but also keep things simple.

As part of the submission process, you grant the University the right to preserve the material and post it openly on the Web. To grant this right, you must own copyright to the work or have obtained the permission of the copyright owner. For more information, see the Academic Commons Copyright policy.