UT Digital Repository: About the Project

Our Vision for UT Digital Repository

UT Digital Repository acquires, organizes, preserves, and provides access to the intellectual capital that makes Tennessee a leader in research and teaching. The academic community is creating more and more new knowledge in digital form.

Digital content enables wide dissemination. Tools such as word processing software, e-mail, blogs, digital cameras, and scanners contribute to a growing body of digital resources with intrinsic value to the researcher.

Researchers draw on content from hard-to-find sources, such as technical reports, grant proposals, conference proceedings, and personal communications, as well as on scholarly work published in journals and books.

UT Digital Repository brings together in one place work produced by the UT community to make the content easily accessible. These services highlight UT’s prominence in advancing knowledge globally.

Goals of the service are:

1. Collect digital content in a variety of formats through submission by content creators.
   
2. Organize and catalog content to make it discoverable.
   
3. Preserve content to assure digital file stability, long-term usage, and security.

Benefits to UT Digital Repository include:

• Visibility
  Depositing your work in UT Digital Repository ensures that global researchers can find it (in Google Scholar, for example) and cite it.
• Permanence
  Libraries traditionally collect, organize, preserve, and provide access to information resources. Standards and practices for these services now encompass digital collections, assuring the stability of a work's online location. UT Digital Repository makes citations to your work as reliable as a scholarly journal, while as accessible as any website.
• Comprehensiveness
  UT Digital Repository supports a variety of file formats. We encourage you to deposit not just the finished work but related materials (including data, images, audio and video files, etc.) to create a "director's cut" that gives context to that work and promotes further scholarship. The library resolves backups, compatibility, and format issues. Not every file format will be supported, but our commitment to preserving the integrity of your work exactly as you deposit it is 100%.
• Control over access
  UT Digital Repository allows limits to who can see various aspects of your work for a given time, if necessary. This is difficult to do on a personal website.
• Context
  UT Digital Repository places you in the larger context of the UT environment, side-by-side with the scholarly and artistic contributions of your colleagues and students. Also, as other universities, institutions, and organizations begin to provide similar services, we will collaborate with them to create discipline-specific services.

UT Digital Repository is designed to meet not only today's demands but also new ones as they evolve. It will continue to grow and evolve to reflect current publishing needs and norms identified by UT faculty, staff, students, and the communities you form.