DRS User Guide/Communities
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Departments, Communities, & Collections
The DRS organizational structure is designed to enhance the discoverability of its content. While all DRS content can easily be found through keyword searching, communities, collections, faculty, and files can also be found by browsing through DRS communities.
- Community: A DRS community represents any Northeastern group, including colleges departments, and research groups. Communities can contain faculty users, collections, or other communities, though it cannot contain files.
- Collection: A typical compilation of files, similar to a folder in a typical file structure.
- Smart Collection: A collection that belongs to a faculty user that is directly connected to the user's community.
- Faculty User: Faculty have their own accounts in the DRS and can be attached to one or more communities.
- Files: Any digital objected uploaded to the DRS. Files can only be stored in collections.
Communities and Departments
DRS faculty, departments, and files are organized hierarchically according to the Northeastern University college and department structure. Colleges, departments, and research groups are treated as communities in the DRS hierarchy, and they are nested underneath the top-level Northeastern University community. Communities can contain collections, users, and other communities.
You can use the default DRS search box to search for a community, or you may browse communities from the DRS home page:
Communities, as well as faculty affiliations with communities, are created, updated, and managed by DRS staff. Community representatives can be granted permission to edit community details, to create and edit community collections, and to deposit files into community collections. To request a new community, or to request access to edit or create collections for a community, please contact DRS staff.
Collections
General Collections
All DRS files are stored and organized in collections, which can be attached to communities, faculty users, and other collections. Most DRS collections are generic collections created and maintained by staff from that DRS community.
User Collections
Faculty Smart Collections
Smart Collections are designed to help Northeastern faculty easily share their scholarly work with the Northeastern University community. A series of predefined Smart Collections are generated for faculty users to use when they first sign in to the DRS: Research Publications, Other Publications, Presentations, Monographs, and Datasets. After a brief set-up period, faculty Smart Collections are connected to his or her associated college, department, research group, or other defined DRS community. This means that files deposited in a Smart Collection will be discoverable from faculty users' collections, community’s collections, and from the Featured Content collections on the front page of the DRS. In the example below, the user uploaded the Policy document to her Research Publications folder, and now it is discoverable in three places:
| Faculty Collection | |
| Community Collection | |
| Homepage Featured Content |
Faculty users need to be formally associated with the appropriate community before deposited material can display as part of their community’s Smart Collections. This connection will be established by DRS staff shortly after faculty first sign in. If you are a faculty member and your material is not displaying as a part of your community’s Smart Collections, please contact DRS staff.
Faculty-created Collections
In addition to Smart Collections, faculty may create personal collections to store materials. These collections can be made public or private, and collection details may be edited as needed. Materials stored in these collections are not shared with a community like they are with Smart Collections, but (if public) will be discoverable during regular browse or search sessions.
Staff Collections
By default, Northeastern staff are not able to upload to the DRS, and therefore are not issued Smart Collections and cannot create personal collections. Northeastern Staff can request deposit access for their community by contacting DRS staff.
Community Collections
Like faculty users, communities can also contain Smart collections and generic colections. A series of predefined Smart Collections (Research Publications, Other Publications, Presentations, Monographs, and Datasets) are generated for the community when it is first created. Colleges and Departments that produce theses or dissertations will also be issued a Theses and Dissertations Smart Collection. Authorized representatives for a community may also create generic collections to store general departmental files that do not belong in the scholarly Smart Collections, such as departmental newsletters and photographs.
Authorized users can upload files to any generic community collection in the same way faculty would upload to their own individual collections by navigating to the file’s destination collection and clicking on the “Add” button in the breadcrumb navigation or in the bottom right corner of the page:
Community Smart Collections will be populated with content uploaded by members of that community to their own Smart Collections. If you are a Northeastern faculty member and your material is not displaying as a part of your community’s Smart Collections, please contact DRS staff.
| DRS | https://repository.library.northeastern.edu | |
| Resources | http://dsg.neu.edu/resources/drs | |
| Contact | Library-Repository-Team[@]neu.edu |