New developments for Knowledge@UChicago, the University’s institutional repository

The University of Chicago Library is enhancing Knowledge@UChicago, the University’s institutional repository for faculty and student research, in order to better meet growing needs and interests around data sharing and preservation, open access, and reproducible research results. In mid-December, visitors to Knowledge@UChicago will encounter a new, user-friendly interface for sharing and accessing research. Improved capabilities for data and software preservation will follow over the winter quarter.

Launched in 2016, Knowledge@UChicago is an open access repository for sharing and preserving scholarly work created by faculty, students, and staff. It currently serves as a home for UChicago faculty and students’ digital research publications such as articles, book chapters, conference materials, and a small number of datasets, and for dissertations and theses by students who choose to make them open to the public. UChicago faculty and students in divisions and departments that range from the Physical Sciences Division to the School of Social Service Administration to the Humanities Division have already contributed publications and datasets to Knowledge@UChicago.

With the support of capital funding, the Library is migrating the repository to the TIND digital platform. TIND is based on the open source software Invenio, originally developed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to manage its own digital outputs.

This new system will offer more features for handling research data in addition to traditional research publications, and will provide greater flexibility for future customization and integration with researchers’ workflows. The first phase of the project will migrate existing content to the new system by the end of December 2018. The second phase, beginning in January, will add new features that better support research data and software preservation, including richer metadata for data deposits and integration with GitHub.

This move will improve the infrastructure available to our University community to make their data available for reuse, new discoveries, and replication. It will also support researchers as they meet requirements for data sharing from funders and publishers, The new developments to the institutional repository are accompanied by additional library data services, including assistance with data acquisition and transformation, data analysis, and data management. We encourage UChicago faculty, students, and staff to contact the Library at knowledge@lib.uchicago.edu to discuss your data management and sharing requirements and to begin depositing scholarly works. Librarians are available for consultations and instructional sessions on the repository for departments and groups on campus.

Knowledge@UChicago is managed and supported by the Library, in collaboration with IT Services at the University of Chicago.