DRS User Guide/Communities

Departments, Communities, & 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.

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You can use the default DRS search box to search for a community, or you may browse communities from the DRS home page:

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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

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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 you to use when you first sign in to the DRS: Research Publications, Other Publications, Presentations, and Datasets. After a brief set-up period, your Smart Collections will be connected to your associated college, department, research group, or other defined DRS community. This means that files you deposit in a Smart Collection will be discoverable from your collections, from your 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:

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You will need to be formally associated with the appropriate community before your deposited material can display as part of your community’s Smart Collections. This connection will be established by DRS staff shortly after you first sign in. If 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 automatically shared with your community, 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 by contacting DRS staff.

Community Collections

Community collections behave similarly to Smart Collections and Faculty created collections. A series of predefined Smart Collections (Research Publications, Other Publications, Presentations, 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 Dissertation Smart Collection. Authorized representatives for a community may also create other 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 community collection in the same way he or she 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.

Although it is possible to upload files to a community’s Smart Collections, most community Smart Collections will be populated with content uploaded by members of that community to their own Smart Collections. The only exception is the Theses and Dissertations collection, which is populated as part of an automated process, and no user intervention is needed. If you are a member of the Northeastern faculty and your material is not displaying as a part of your community’s Smart Collections, please contact DRS staff.