Collection Development for an Institutional Repository through Collaborations between Departments

Poster presentation: St. Mary’s University School of Law’s Sarita Kenedy East Law Library recently launched an institutional repository. The School of Law and law library had no preexisting digital collections. In order to quickly acquire appropriate content, the law library focused on locating born digital materials, such as School of Law publications, which had not previously been formally archived. The law library also attempted to identify digitization performed as part of routine library operations, and to assess digitized material for long term archiving. The law library was able to quickly and efficiently build an online collection for the repository by collecting preexisting born digital material, and assessing for inclusion material provided digitally to professors after conversion from legacy formats such as microfilm, and audiotape. This poster presents on how interdepartmental collaborations provided the framework to populate a digital collection in the absence of resources or equipment dedicated specifically to digitization.