DRS Fact Sheet

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Overview

The Digital Repository Service (DRS) is a secure repository system designed to store and share the scholarly work from Northeastern University’s colleges, departments, faculty, and staff. The DRS was developed by Northeastern University Libraries as a tool for the University community to protect the valuable information and data that has been created as part of the University’s research and instructional mission. It provides long-term security for the files it stores, as well as access management controls and support for various metadata standards (including MODS and Dublin Core) to help ensure that data is as accessible and usable in the present and the future.

Anyone is welcome to use the DRS to discover publicly available content, and members of the Northeastern community are encouraged to sign in to access additional content that may not be publicly available. Faculty can upload files, make them public, and share them with anyone, or restrict access to only a certain set of users.

The DRS also provides mechanisms through which repository data can be used in other venues, such as departmental portals, digital research projects, and online publications. Because the DRS is built using Fedora, an open source repository system with a user-friendly API, objects stored in the DRS can be accessed and displayed using customized web-publishing tools, like Omeka, Drupal, or WordPress.

Community

The DRS is structured as a digital representation of the Northeastern University community.
Colleges, Departments, and research groups are represented as independent communities underneath the Northeastern University umbrella, each with their own collections of scholarly or administrative files.
Northeastern University faculty and staff are also represented in the DRS, and they can curate their own collections of scholarly or administrative files.
The DRS community structure easily supports interdisciplinary work and relationships between communities, staff, and faculty.

Content

Members of the Northeastern community are encouraged to deposit scholarly, administrative, or archival materials with lasting value.
- Scholarly materials: faculty-produced materials that fall into one of four categories: Research Publications, Presentations, Monographs, or Datasets.
- Administrative materials: current departmental photographs, newsletters, and meeting minutes.
- Archival materials: scholarly or administrative materials with historical significance.
Northeastern communities, groups, staff, and faculty are also encouraged to work with DRS staff to use the repository to store large sets of project and research files, which can be deposited in a single large deposit, or on a regular basis.
Current Repository Collections:
- Electronic Theses and Dissertations
- Office of Marketing and Communications photograph collections
- Archives and Special Collections Digital Collections
- National Interpreter Education Center Terp Talk Videos
- Stephen Sadow Interviews with Jewish Latin American Writers and Artists
- Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS)
- College of Professional Studies photograph collections
- College of Engineering photograph collections
- School of Law Exams

Features

Self deposit: Faculty members may deposit their own material.
Easy account creation: Accounts are tied to NU credentials, therefore all a user needs to do to create an account is login using their myNEU username and password.
Support tools: Support documents include a User Guide and an FAQ. Training sessions are available for every user through the DSG (http://dsg.neu.edu/events/).
Simple discovery: The locally developed interface offers user-friendly searching and browsing.
Saving: Materials may be saved to personal sets or downloaded for future use.
Secure access: Access to sensitive or private files can be safely restricted from discovery.
Advanced tools: Options for bulk uploads and group management are available.
Open Access: In the spirit of Open Access, sharing research as widely as possible is highly encouraged, and access to most deposited Northeastern research materials is unrestricted.

Technology

The DRS was developed using series of open source technologies:

Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) is the underlying storage architecture of the repository.
Samvera (formerly known as Hydra) is a suite of tools and technologies that processes the files and metadata stored in Fedora so users can interact with them in a meaningful way. Samvera uses Ruby on Rails to program, Solr to index, and Blacklight to enable searching and browsing.