We are happy to announce a new, consolidated, Institutional Repository at the USF Libraries! The new repository, Digital Commons at the University of South Florida, highlights the research of USF faculty, students, and staff across our three campuses as well as features conferences, scholar profiles, digital collections, theses and dissertations, and open access textbooks and journals.
The first phase of this repository reconfiguration was completed in summer of 2021 when the research works, open access textbooks and journals, electronic theses and dissertations, conferences, and scholarly profiles of faculty and students from the Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota-Manatee campuses were all combined into one repository. By joining the research output of all USF faculty in one easily searchable location, the Libraries can better support multi-campus collaborative projects.
The second and final phase of the repository reconfiguration was the migration and organization of over 70,000 items in over 200 collections from the Tampa Digital Collections platform, SobekCM. In addition to migrating items and metadata from the previous repository platform into the Digital Commons at the University of South Florida repository, the project allowed the Libraries to make some organizational improvements to collections and identify areas for exciting new features in the years to come. New functionality options, such as linking collections to archival finding aids and geo-locating items on embedded maps are starting to be employed and will further improve the user experience going forward.
The Karst Information Portal was just one collection to benefit from the organizational improvements made during the migration of Digital Collections. Find out more about this resource in our June post: Millions of Years in the Making: A New Platform for the Karst Information Portal.
The Digital Collections of all campuses can be searched through one interface, or individually. Users can also browse collections based on collecting areas, including:
- Children’s Literature
- Creekshed Collection
- Early Visions of Florida
- Environment and Natural Science
- Florida Studies
- LGBTQ+ Collections
- USF History and Archives
- USF Oral History Program
- The Weekly Challenger
Digital collections continues to grow with new items and collections added every year. Explore Digital Commons at the University of South Florida to find the stories and people who made the university and the Tampa Bay area what it is today.