TCDL 2025

Storing, Organizing, and Sharing: Building Metadata Infrastructure for Open Educational Materials
By: Henna Punjabi

Texas State University libraries has continued to create and support the development of open educational materials for use within their community. These learning objects, however, are not easily discoverable or stored in a centralized location. This makes content sharing and measuring impact difficult. The institutional repository at Texas State utilizes DSpace and is hosted by TDL. Using the already established institutional repository, we created a new community of collections to store, organize, and make open materials discoverable. This open education collection would be built from scratch in many aspects, as DSpace’s flexibility allows for individual collections to operate differently as suits their needs. However, this flexibility can easily allow for a lack of structure, consistency, and quality in metadata across a collection. Guidelines and standardization are primarily dependent on external people to implement, rather than technological boundaries. To ensure quality metadata, I led the research, creation, and implementation of extensive standards and guidelines, created intentional collections to organize current and future items, and established infrastructure within the open education repository. This presentation highlights the necessity for external guidelines in digital repositories and explores the benefits of additional metadata fields for learning object repositories.

Restructuring the IR: Who, What, When, Why, How?
By: Xiao Zeng, Susan Hoover, & Taylor Davis-Van Atta

In recent years, the University of Houston Institutional Repository (UHIR) accumulated thousands of new items but, due to pandemic-time shifts in staffing, lacked coordinated administrative oversight. After joining UH Libraries as the Open Publishing Librarian in October 2024, I assumed responsibility for the repository and prioritized an assessment of the UHIR, its documentation, content, and relationship with both library and campus partners. In collaboration with colleagues in our metadata unit and preservation department, I holistically reviewed and revised the repository’s administrative and user documentation to consolidate resources and provide essential guidance for internal processes and campus communities. This step established shared understandings that serve as a foundation for long-term sustainability. Next, we conducted a data-driven evaluation to analyze the IR’s content discoverability and navigation. By examining peer repositories within the Texas Digital Library (TDL), we gained insights into scalability, transparency, and service quality that might inform our repository management practices. With support from our metadata team, we initiated a process of restructuring roughly 17,000 items across the UHIR while preserving item URLs for citation integrity. This presentation will discuss these processes and collaborations before discussing our approach to refining batch ingest workflows and the implementation of a SharePoint-based project management framework for streamlining incoming collections from anywhere on campus. By further studying management practices of peer repositories, we aim to accelerate UHIR’s growth, improve user services, and reshaping the UHIR into a sustainable campus resource.