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SNHU Academic Archive

The SNHU Academic Archive is an institutional repository, or digital library, providing free access to faculty and student research and other university resources. Learn more about its policies and use.

SNHU Academic Archive Policies

The following policies explain the principles, responsibilities, and guidelines for Southern New Hampshire University’s digital repository, known hereafter as the SNHU Academic Archive, or the Academic Archive. They express in detail Southern New Hampshire University’s commitment to digital preservation and access made available through the work of the Shapiro Library and Information Technology Solutions (ITS).

These policies will be reviewed annually. (Last revision date: September 7, 2011).

Principles

The Shapiro Library and ITS will:

  • Retain all items indefinitely
  • Ensure that anyone may access metadata (descriptive information such as title, date, abstract) free of charge
  • Ensure that the university’s intellectual output is freely accessible
  • Follow the standards presented by the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and the guidelines for Trusted Digital Repositories
  • Follow best practices of leading libraries and digital archives
  • Keep statistics of repository use


Roles and Responsibilities

Many people are ultimately involved in the process of access and preservation, including creators, users, and curators. Each has a responsibility to understand the following policies.

Creator Responsibilities

  • Items may only be submitted by SNHU academic staff, and registered students of the institution.
  • Authors may only submit their own work for archiving.
  • The validity and authenticity of the content of submissions is the sole responsibility of the submitter.
  • The administrator only vets items for the eligibility of authors/submitters, relevance to the scope of the repository, valid layout and format, and the exclusion of spam.
  • Changes to deposited items are not permitted.
    • Errata and corrigenda lists may be included with the original record if required.
    • If necessary, an updated version may be deposited.
      • There will be links between earlier and later versions, with the most recent version clearly identified.
  • Items may not normally be removed from the repository.
    • Acceptable reasons for withdrawal include:
      • Proven copyright violation or plagiarism
      • Legal requirements and proven violations
      • National Security
      • Falsified research
    • Items may not be submitted until any publishers' or funders' embargo period has expired.
    • Any copyright violations are entirely the responsibility of the authors/submitters.
    • Reported violations of copyrights will be dealt with in accordance with the appropriate copyright law.
  • If the repository receives proof of copyright violation, the relevant item will be removed immediately.
    • The full text of withdrawn items is deleted entirely from the database.
    • Withdrawn items' identifiers/URLs are retained indefinitely.
    • URLs will continue to point to 'tombstone' citations, to avoid broken links and to retain item histories.
    • The metadata of withdrawn items will not be searchable.

User Responsibilities

  • No rights have been granted for re-use of full text of the items.
  • The metadata may be re-used in any medium without prior permission for not-for-profit purposes, provided the OAI Identifier or a link to the original metadata record is given.
  • The metadata must not be re-used in any medium for commercial purposes without formal permission from the SNHU Digital Initiatives Librarian.

Curator Responsibilities

  • The Digital Initiatives Librarian is responsible for managing the repository, including creation of metadata standards, scanning workflows, policy development, and quality control.
  • One graduate assistant is responsible for scanning analog documents, optical character recognition (OCR) processing, and access file (PDF) creation.
  • The Policy Committee is comprised of the Dean of the Library, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Electronic Resources Librarian, Technical Services Librarian, Access Services Librarian, and the Associate Dean of the Faculty. It is tasked with determining policies for the repository and discusses any other policy questions that might arise, whether they are related to file format questions, collection development, or questions about metadata. The Policy Committee meets on a regular basis.
  • The ITS department is responsible for maintaining the servers, the DSpace software, and also for preventing loss of data.