Policies

Policies are still being written, in light of the experience we've gained from early work on the repository. In the meantime, here are three of guides based on our policy drafts.

Collection owners need to be aware of the following:

1. Collection Guide
2. Copyright and Access Guide

These guides adopt naming conventions for digital items and collections that are explained below.

Items, Collections and Communities in Demetrius

Demetrius is powered by the DSpace repository software, and thus has adopted the naming conventions for digital resources and collections that have been established by the developers of DSpace. Users of Demetrius need to be familiar with these naming conventions, and how they relate to the campus-wide policies developed for Demetrius.

In DSpace terms, the fundamental unit of organisation is an Item; for example, a digital image, PDF file, data set, and so on. Items are grouped into Collections. Collections are organised into Communities. The relationships between Demetrius Items, Collections and Communities are illustrated below.

So what is a Community?

In DSpace, Collection groupings are called Communities. However, the term 'Community' is also used to refer to the institutional 'communities' that are responsible for Demetrius Communities. To help clarify this distinction, Demetrius Communities are set in italics.

A Community can be any structural or administrative unit or area of the ANU. A department, centre, faculty, college, research school or project can all be (or have) Communities. Indeed, they can have multiple Communities. It's possible for non-University groups to have Communities, as long as there is some relationship with the ANU.

The key point here is that Communities depositing resources in Demetrius should be organisational units with longevity and status within the University. They should exist for extended periods, and they must 'belong' to a higher-order organisational grouping on campus. This is important: if a department or project ceases, then there must be a group (such as a faculty or college) that can make decisions regarding the future of that department or project's Community. We can't make that decision for you: as maintainers we do not have ownership or control of the material deposited.

Ordinarily, an individual can't be (or have) a Community. Partly this is because we don't have the resources to deal with every ANU researcher individually; more importantly, this is to avoid questions about what to do with deposited materials should a researcher retire or move on. We don't enter into these questions; instead, it is up to the researcher to sort this issue out with their host Community.

Thus, each Collection is considered the responsibility of an 'owning' Community at the ANU. Each Community represents the interests of individual depositors, and is the organisational unit that the maintainers of Demetrius will work with. The Community is considered synonymous with 'depositor' from the point of view of the Demetrius repository.

There is potentially no limit to the number of Communities that can exist within the repository, however each Community is responsible for at least one Collection.

By 'responsible', we mean that a Community:

• Decides what Items (and in what format) should be deposited in its Collections;
• Decides how Collections are internally organized to meet its needs;
• Decides whether Items should be amended or removed from its Collections;
• May grant Demetrius maintainers approval to copy or make Items or Collections available to third parties;
• Acts on behalf of anybody whose Items or Collections are deposited by that Community;
• Retains copyright, or represents copyright holders, for anything deposited in its Collections

In all cases, we can provide advice to the owners of Items and Collections about discharging their responsibilities, but the final decision (or prerogative, or right) about managing these resources rests with the Community.