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.

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 several of the metadata fields that you will use to describe items for easy retrieval. Members of the Academic Commons staff will guide you through this 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 library, archives, or museum staff member will work with you to develop a project plan. Because University Collections are maintained or supported by the library, archives or museum, this type of collection will be created at solely the discretion of these units.

Adding content to your collection

Materials are added to collections through customized, step-by-step workflow interfaces. In many cases, a single person may be 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 the steps in content submission. The nature of the collection will determine the necessary steps. In some cases, the submission process will require a high degree of consistency and attention to detail. In other cases, item submission will adhere 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 unrestricted permission of the copyright owner to grant the required rights. For more information, see the Academic Commons Copyright policy.