Website Integration
Using the Iowa State University Digital Repository is a great way for departments, programs, centers, institutes, and other groups on campus to showcase the expertise of their faculty, staff, and students. There are many ways for departments to take advantage of the benefits of the Digital Repository, with multiple methods available for integrating Digital Repository content with websites.
Links
Linking to your department's scholarship in the Iowa State University Digital Repository is a great way to highlight your department's research. Be sure to link to your:
- Department's repository site; and
- Faculty/staff SelectedWorks Scholarly Profiles.
These links can be included on the Home page, research pages, and faculty profiles.
See it in action: The Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering includes an "ABE Digital Repository" button at the bottom of its Home page, includes links to the repository in its menu, under "Faculty by Focus Area" and again under "Research," and provides links to SelectedWorks Scholarly Profiles from its faculty profile pages.
Embedding Readership Activity Map
Readership Activity Maps are featured throughout the Digital Repository. The maps feature a location pin dropping each time something from the repository is downloaded, identifying what has been downloaded and where. Most departments have their own Readership Activity Maps, which can easily be embedded on department, center, and other websites to highlight the global reach of your research.
See it in action:The Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management has embedded its Readership Activity Map on its Home and Publications pages.
Embedding Scholarly Profiles
When we work with faculty and staff to add their publications to the Digital Repository, we create and update SelectedWorks Scholarly Profiles for them. These profiles gather together a faculty member's works from across the Digital Repository, allowing researchers to openly access their work from a single page. Featuring these profiles on a departmental website is a great way to highlight faculty members' expertise. Additonal features with the scholarly profiles allow departments to identify potential mentors and media contacts.
Browse Iowa State University Profiles
Search Bar
You can include a search bar on your site that will search the Digital Repository, or a specific collection within the Digital Repository.
Highlight Most Downloaded Publications
Each collection in the repository has an RSS feed that can be displayed on websites. Using these RSS feeds, we can generate lists of recent publications, or the most downloaded publications.
See it in action: The Graduate College uses the RSS feed from the Graduate Theses and Dissertations collection to highlight the most downloaded theses and dissertations.
Populate Research/Publications Webpages
Every collection in the repository has an OAI-PMH feed (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) that allows websites to harvest and display information about publications stored in the Digital Repository. You can use this feature to automatically populate your department's publications page, which will update whenever new publications are added to the Digital Repository.
See it in action: The Department of Economics uses the repository's OAI feed to populate its Research pages, reducing the time and energy needed to keep the pages current.