OXFORD, Miss. – Bepress, a leading academic software firm, has selected the University of Mississippi‘s Michelle Emanuel as a 2023 Digital Commons IR All-Star.
Emanuel, head of metadata and digital initiatives for University Libraries, is one of four 2023 All-Stars and recently presented “Powering Your Institutional Showcase with Niche Collections” at the 2023 Digital Commons North American Conference.
IR All-Stars spotlights individuals who have demonstrated a unique and replicable approach to institutional repository, or IR, success. The goal of the award is to provide the IR community with the knowledge to emulate and build upon some of the most successful initiatives identified.
Michelle Emanuel, head of metadata and digital initiatives for University Libraries, shows off the commemorative bobblehead of herself she received as a Digital Commons IR All-Star. Photo by Elizabeth Batte/University Libraries
Bepress selected Emanuel for her work with eGrove, the university’s digital institutional repository.
“I’m incredibly grateful to be recognized,” she said. “We’ve worked very hard to get the repository off the ground, both migrating existing content and working with faculty, staff and students to generate new content.
“It’s paid off in that we’ve had over 3 million downloads just over four years, from 235 countries, including one download in Antarctica.
“To be selected as one of the four Digital Commons IR All-Stars means that they are impressed by what we’re doing with our IR. And that’s great to hear.”
Hosted on Bepress Digital Commons platform, eGrove launched in October 2018 and collects research and scholarly output selected and deposited by the individual university departments and centers. Included are theses and dissertations from students and open access journal articles and/or data sets from faculty and students.
“We have the UM yearbooks and the born-digital issues of The Daily Mississippian from 2010 to the present,” Emanuel said. “We have recently launched a project to work with a vendor to have the newspaper digitized from its archival print issues dating back to 1911, some of which are extremely fragile.”
The repository also hosts the library’s digital collections from the Department of Archives and Special Collections. Staff members are also working with campus departments to archive their web content before the new Ole Miss website launches.
“We are hosting more and more digital scholarship projects, like the upcoming mapping project for the James Meredith collection, ‘Dear Mr. Meredith,'” she said.