Table of Contents
School of Nursing Collaborates on
Texas Medical Center’s Digital Repository
Once faculty retire, researchers move on to other projects and students graduate, much of their work and many of their papers are lost.
Janet G. Johnson
In an effort to preserve the intellectual output and to make it available to students, faculty and researchers around the world, The University of Texas School of Nursing at Houston is collaborating with the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center (HAM-TMC) Library to initiate the Texas Medical Center’s first digital repository.
A digital repository is a digitally published collection of an institution’s scholarly work and research. Through one Web site, a worldwide audience can access an institution’s collections of theses, dissertations, pre-prints, post-prints and other published work.
Janet G. Johnson, director of the School of Nursing’s Center for Education and Information Resources, said the new repository is, to her knowledge, the first to be developed by a nursing school.
“The people with the most expertise in cataloging and describing assets of this type are librarians, so we went to the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library (HAM-TMC) and found they also had the vision of creating a repository for these scholarly assets that exist across the entire medical center,” Johnson said.
After developing a strategy for collecting the scholarly assets of TMC member institutions, HAM-TMC decided to pilot an abbreviated version of the initiative to demonstrate its feasibility – with the School of Nursing.
“We’re modeling our repository after the scholarly commons at Penn,” Johnson explained. For example, they are uploading the scholarly works of Nancy Bergstrom, Ph.D., the Theodore J. and Mary E. Trumble Professor of Aging Research and director of the Center on Aging. Bergstrom is known internationally for her work in nursing interventions to prevent pressure ulcers in at-risk patients.
“Some of Dr. Bergstrom’s work has been translated into a number of languages, but much of her early research is not public,” Johnson said. “She was immediately interested in the project. In some cases, the process can be as important as the exploration and the outcomes, so we are posting her published work, as well as earlier versions that shed light on research and the academic process.”
The developers are using Google Scholar to index the new database, so that anyone in the world can search the new HAM-TMC digital repository.
When the pilot program was introduced at the School of Nursing, the response was extremely positive and enthusiastic. Scholarly journals have increased in cost; some have disappeared; and researchers are looking for other ways to create a presence for their work and to facilitate collaborations with other investigators.
“Our faculty at the School of Nursing see the digital repository as a new and dynamic way for their ideas – however raw or advanced – to be assessed and utilized,” Johnson said.
To access the HAM-TMC digital commons, go to http://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/uthson/.
By Alice Adams