DRS

10 Years of the DRS: Environmental Voices

In our series of posts highlighting 10 years of the Digital Repository Service (DRS), I wanted to shine a light on the audio and video materials we host that engage with global warming, pollution, and the climate emergency.

Student Research

The annual Research, Innovation, and Scholarship Expo (RISE) is an opportunity for students and faculty to showcase their research focused on solutions to real-life problems. In 2021, these presentations were recorded.

Screenshot of an infographic on environmental justice
  • The debt calculator: a gratitude-based approach to environmental justice by Kira Mok and Sophie Kelly describes how Chelsea and East Boston have a higher burden of pollution and negative health consequences compared to more wealthy parts of Boston, which benefit from industry in these neighborhoods. Their project “What Does Chelsea Do for You?” led to an infographic and online quiz about the debt Boston residents owe to these areas.
  • Northeastern University green chemistry education symposium, a presentation by Olivia Sterns, Umin Jalloh, Christopher Mahir, Christina McConney, and Angelica Fiuza, describes a sustainable and environmentally responsible chemistry curriculum and plans for a related conference. You can also check out the organization Beyond Benign.
  • The impact of biological knowledge on pro-environmental behavior is a presentation by Kyleigh Watson, Kelly Marchese, Jasmine Ho, and Daniela Ras that explores the relationship between study participants’ knowledge of nature, urbanicity, and implicit and explicit connection to the natural world.

Podcast Episodes

The What’s New podcast, hosted by Dean of the Library Dan Cohen, is one of the most popular collections in the DRS. It consists of wide-ranging conversations with faculty members across the university.

Coursework

The DRS team also works with professors to host student coursework in the repository.

Screenshot of a video title screen with the heading "5 Easy Ways to Save Money & Help the Environment"

These selections demonstrate how the DRS documents both the climate crisis and the innovation solutions emerging from Northeastern’s academic community.

DRS Collection Profile: The Communications Photo Archive

Several students walk around campus paths on a sunny day. A white building with a sign that says "LISSER HALL" is in the background
A photograph of students on the Oakland campus, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20649629. Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University. 

If you’ve seen pictures of campus happenings, then you’ve seen the hard work of the Northeastern University photographers. This team is responsible for documenting the day-to-day activity that takes place on Northeastern’s campuses, capturing everything from sporting events to researcher portraits to candid photos of students going about their day.

Matthew Modoono, Alyssa Stone, and many other photographers in the Communications Office have used their cameras to document life at Northeastern for decades. They have been recognized by the University Photographers Association of America, the National Press Photographers Association, and the New England Newspaper & Press Association, and have received several awards, including Picture of the Year and Photographer of the Year, for their tremendous skill and vision in the field of photography.

Library staff are responsible for archiving the printed photographs captured through 2010 (digitized copies are also available in the Northeastern University photograph collection (A103). Since 2010, we also help facilitate access to their digital collection in the Digital Repository Service’s Communications Photo Archive (access to the photographs in this collection are limited to Northeastern faculty and staff).

The Communications Photo Archive has served as a record of recent activity since 2015, when the Digital Repository Service first launched. Since then, the photographs stored in the collection (more than 172,000 at the time of this writing) have been viewed and downloaded approximately 400,000 times. The photographs can be seen in many places around the university, including websites, printed brochures, magazines, social media, and in the daily articles published in Northeastern Global News.

Screenshot of an article on a web page titled NGN News. The headline is "Punk rock and tacos: How a drummer turned real estate agent found restaurant success." Under the headline is a photo of a man wearing a black baseball cap and t-shirt shaking a yellow cocktail tumbler behind a bar.
A screenshot of an NGN article that features a photograph stored in the DRS, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20533071

Photographs in the collection capture:

Graduates throw their caps in the air under a blue sky in Fenway Park. The Fenway Park sign is visible behind the caps
Students celebrate at the 2025 undergraduate commencement ceremony held at Fenway Park, https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20740045. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University.

Photographs of commencement make up a large portion of the collections, with about 20% of the 172,000 photos described using the terms “graduation” or “commencement.” In fact, some of the busiest days for uploading photographs to the DRS happen during the commencement season, with photographers regularly adding more than 1,000 photographs a day.

Although the photographs in this collection are only available to Northeastern faculty and staff, the collection regularly appears in the list of the top 10 most-used collections in the DRS — a testament to how important the photos are to the day-to-day work at the university.

Be sure to check the Communications Photo Archives regularly for the most recent photos of life at the university. You can sort search results by “Recently created” or “Recently updated” to view the most current shots. You may also click the “Recently added” button to sort the entire collection by the most recently uploaded images. The “Limit your search” button can be used to limit your results by the name of the photographer or the year the photograph was taken.

Contact me or my team for help using the DRS or finding photographs in the collection. Visit the Brand Center’s Photography page for information about the photographs and photographers, as well as how you can access the photographs and use them for university business.

And please enjoy some of my favorite photographs from the Communications Photo Archive: animals on the Boston campus!

A yellow/white dog wearings a graduation gown and cap.
https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20732128, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A majestic hawk sits in a tree and looks to the left.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20236444, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A yellow/white dog wearing a blue birthday hat bites at a bubble in a field. The Boston city skyline is visible in the background
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20467241, Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University.
A small brown rabbit sits on some sticks.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20452354, Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University.
A bumble bee flies above a blue hydrangea
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20444529, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A white French bulldog wearing a blue harness swims in a pond next to some lily pads. The dog's eyes are closed and it looks very content
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20411840, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A gray squirrel sits on top of a pumpkin outside of a sliding door.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20325749, Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University.
A white axolotl with red fins swims
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20252465, Photo by Adam Glanzman.

This post was written as part of a series celebrating 10 years of the DRS. Check out A Decade of the Digital Repository Service and What is the DRS and who is it for? to read more about the history of the DRS.

100,000 public items available in the DRS!

The 100,000th publicly available file in the Digital Repository Service was deposited in July: a dissertation from the English Department titled Women Writing Racelessness: Performativity And Racial Absence In Twentieth Century Women’s Writing, by Sarah Payne. This milestone was achieved through the library’s and the university’s commitment to supporting open access to the scholarly output of the university, as well as to the archival artifacts that document the university’s history.

Many of the 100,000 public files are discoverable through Google and other search engines, as well as portals like the Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America, which are designed to bring together digitized materials from various sources. Thanks to the openness of these materials, the DRS averages more than 2,000 unique visitors and more than 3,600 file interactions each day. Public materials stored in the DRS have been cited by regional and national news organizations, including the New York Times and WBUR, as well as in Reddit discussions and Wikipedia articles.

Here are a few digital collections for you to explore:

The DRS will continue to grow as Northeastern faculty, staff, and students continue to produce articles, images, research, and artifacts that represent the tremendous work happening at the university. Faculty and staff are welcome to sign in to the DRS and upload their own research publications, presentations, monographs, and datasets at their leisure. To get started uploading lots of materials for large projects, contact your subject librarian or the library’s Repository Team: Library-Repository-Team[@]neu.edu.

2017 Call for Proposals: The CERES Exhibit Toolkit

CERES Exhibit Toolkit Call for Proposals The Digital Scholarship Group is now accepting proposals for the next round of CERES Exhibit Toolkit development (formerly known as The DRS Project Toolkit). The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is a user-friendly set of tools for building digital projects and publications using digital materials from the Digital Repository Service (DRS) or the Digital Public Library of America. With CERES users can create exhibits, galleries, maps, timelines, and playlists that draw digital materials dynamically from the DRS or the DPLA. We are also excited to announce a new program of support for classroom use of the CERES Exhibit Toolkit. We invite proposals from faculty for courses to be held in Fall 2017 and Spring 2018. Feature development CERES will be a collaborative endeavor and a great opportunity to experiment with publishing your project’s materials. If you have a project idea, we’d love to hear from you! Just answer a few questions about your project to apply. Examples of successful projects from the first two years of the CERES project include: Accepted projects will partner with the DSG and DRS teams to use CERES to securely store their project materials in the DRS and create a customized WordPress site to publish those materials on the web. If you have questions, the DSG staff are glad to meet and discuss project proposals before the deadline; please contact us at DSG@northeastern.edu to set up a meeting. Please visit the DRS Resources page for more information about the DRS. If you don’t think CERES is right for your project, but you are still interested in securely storing project files in the DRS, contact Sarah Sweeney.

Snell Library staff adopt Open Access Policy

On June 22, 2016, the staff of Snell Library adopted an Open Access Policy. By establishing this policy, Snell Library joins a growing group of academic libraries in the United States with similar policies, designed to ensure the greatest possible access to the research and scholarship produced by their staff members. It also joins a much larger community of research institutions and subunits of institutions (e.g. schools, colleges, departments) who have adopted Open Access policies—over 600 worldwide. Snell Library’s policy is particularly timely, as the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has just issued its own Policy Statement on Open Access to Scholarship by Academic Librarians. While ACRL’s statement is limited specifically to librarians, the Snell Library policy applies to all full-time library staff. Snell’s staff includes a number of academic professionals who are non-librarians, as well as its support staff, who are active in creating output that should be shared with a wide audience. The Open Access Policy requires library staff members to deposit into the Digital Repository Service (DRS) copies of their published articles as well as posters and presentation materials delivered at conferences, where they are not prohibited from doing so through prior agreements with publishers. Staff members may receive a waiver of the policy for any individual work; this ensures that staff retain the freedom to publish where they choose, regardless of publishers’ willingness to accept the policy. (Given the huge increase in faculty-driven open access policies across the U.S. and worldwide, though, many publishers are already very familiar with the requirements of these policies and have built accommodations for them into their own practices.)

Q & A

What is open access?

Open access literature is freely available online for anyone to read. Open access is provided to scholarly articles in a variety of ways. The most common models are:
  • Open access journals: all articles published in these publications are openly accessible. May or may not involve a fee for authors
  • “Hybrid” journals: subscription-based (“closed”) journals in which at the author’s request, and usually for an additional fee, individual articles are made openly accessible.
  • Article archiving: authors deposit a copy of their article (manuscript or final formatted version) in a repository, typically an institutional or discipline-based repository.
This policy is primarily aimed at facilitating the “article archiving” form of open access.

Why an open access policy?

The goals of this policy are to expand access to Snell Library staff research and scholarship, and to lead by example both at Northeastern University and in the profession. Like many libraries, Snell Library actively supports open access to research output and advocates for Northeastern faculty to make their work available open-access where possible, in order to provide greater access to research for those who are not able to pay subscription costs or charges for article access.

What are the public benefits of open access?

The most obvious public benefit of open access is that research results will be more accessible to more people in more locations. Currently, most individuals have very limited access to research publications—open access makes published results available to researchers and scholars affiliated with smaller institutions or non-profit organizations, and researchers and scholars in developing countries. This may spur additional scholarly progress or entrepreneurial innovation. Even individuals who do currently have access to publications via subscription services may find benefits from open access, such as easier collaboration with colleagues at other institutions, more accessible and affordable course readings for students, or by enabling new forms of scholarship such as computational analysis.

How does this policy benefit authors?

A number of studies have shown that articles that are freely available online often have increased citation rates and impact, though these benefits seem to vary across disciplines. Open access articles are also more easily discovered by researchers using online tools such as Google Scholar, and are more easily linked to and discussed in public forums. (Note: Q&A excerpted from an FAQ for library staff about the policy, which was adapted with permission from a similar document created at the University of Minnesota.)