ScholarSphere Springs Forward

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Judging by the recurring snow fall and the lingering cold in various parts of the country, it may not feel quite like spring yet, but we on the ScholarSphere service team have a spring in our step! We're pleased to announce the newest release of ScholarSphere - version 1.4. This version adds two new features as well as improvements to the user interface.


First, the features

Look who's full-text indexing! That's right. ScholarSphere functionality now includes full-text indexing and searching, a standard feature in most repository software applications. Because this feature enables keyword searching on more than the metadata that users input to describe their files, it expands the possibilities for rich content discovery.

A note about access for the files searched . . .
The visibility levels of files (whether open access, Penn State, or private) that result from the search depend on permissions for visibility and whether a Penn State user is logged in or not. If not logged in, and users do a search, the results will be public files; neither private files, nor files only for the Penn State community, will be among the results. If logged in as a Penn State user, the results will include public files as well as files visible to the Penn State community. If logged in as a Penn State user with private files, then you, the logged-in user, will see your relevant private files in the results list.

Are you LinkedIn? From its launch ScholarSphere has integrated widgets for social networking services, such as Twitter and Facebook, and equally social citation management tools, such as Zotero and Mendeley, for easy, outward sharing of one's research. ScholarSphere now includes a widget for LinkedIn, the popular professional networking tool.

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The profile page each user receives upon logging into ScholarSphere also shows the most prominent networking sites, now including LinkedIn.

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To link out to your page in these social networking services, just click on the "Edit your profile" button on the upper right-hand corner of the profile page and enter your handles for the ones you belong to. For example, for my LinkedIn account, I entered "/in/patriciah."

Next, the user experience

Cleaner layout for the user profile page. The user profile page makes more efficient use of space by incorporating a tabbed interface to represent aspects of a user - namely, her highlighted files, profile (user information), and activity.

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Functional, felicitous facets. ScholarSphere has always had a "Browse By" list of facets on the left-hand side of the site. At the end of each shortened facet list is a link taking users to the complete list of whatever facet is being accessed, be it "resource type," "creator," "keyword," etc. This link opens up a dialogue box, now with an improved user interface, displaying the complete list, allowing users to sort numerically (in descending order) or alphabetically.

resource_type_alpha.png

Features under active development

This spring is a busy one for the ScholarSphere development team. They'll be working on integration of collections functionality, deposit by proxy, and a hook to the Dropbox service (to enable deposit of larger files). These features, which currently are the most in demand by our users, will position the service well for increasing adoption by campus entities, such as colleges and departments interested in showcasing the best of their students' work, or grant-funded research projects wishing to disseminate their outputs in the form of presentations, preprints, data sets, and project reports. 

Also, a heads up: we will be doing another round of usability testing and thus recruiting for test users to give us feedback on the new features and functionalities in ScholarSphere. Recruitment emails to the Penn State community should go out sometime in April.

Last but not least, stay tuned to the Content Stewardship Council blog to learn more about our partnerships with other institutions on developing ScholarSphere, and how version 1.4 of ScholarSphere has been a concerted community effort.

Lots of possibilities abound! We've only touched the surface of what ScholarSphere can, and will, achieve.


For this blog post, I've asked Patricia Gael, graduate assistant in Publishing and Curation Services, to write about her recent survey of retention policies in institutional repositories - a benchmarking exercise toward understanding what should inform our own retention policies for ScholarSphere. Comments and questions are welcome!
~ Patricia Hswe, co-lead, Publishing and Curation Services


I'm happy to have been invited to write a guest post for the Content Stewardship blog! As a graduate assistant in Publishing and Curation Services and a doctoral candidate amassing large amounts of data while writing my dissertation, I've been watching ScholarSphere's development with interest. My current use of ScholarSphere could be called "experimental": I've deposited a few trial items, but I haven't yet uploaded any of my research. As I consider my future use of the repository, I've been thinking about the longevity of my data. This post is written from my viewpoint as a prospective ScholarSphere user. 

One of the questions Patricia Hswe and Linda Friend have been receiving at their ScholarSphere demonstrations is, "how long will my content remain accessible in ScholarSphere?" The short answer, and the one they've been giving, is, "as long as you leave it there"; the ScholarSphere team is committed to archiving and preserving deposited data, and, unless a user chooses to delete his or her own content, all items will remain safely in the repository. For all current, practical purposes this is true. But a longer and more detailed response to the "how long?" question would need to include phrases like "for the foreseeable future" and "as far as we know." 

ScholarSphere is a new and still-in-development service and Penn State is still working to figure out what it will look like in the future. We are not alone in facing the challenges of long-term data archiving; many other universities will be making similar decisions about the retention of the data in their repositories. However, a recent quick survey of repository preservation policies suggests that retention strategies remain indefinite and unstandardized. 

Many preservation policies focus on the types of files uploaded and the likelihood that those files will be usable in the future. The University of Michigan's DeepBlue, for example, provides "three levels of preservation support for specific file formats" that are determined by "a set of evaluation criteria including prevalence of the file format in the marketplace, whether the format is proprietary, the availability of tools for emulation or migration and the availability of local resources to take specific preservation actions." These filetype-based preservation policies are helpful. Users should be aware of the technical reasons their data might not remain usable so that they can decide whether to adjust the formats in which they're storing their data. But even data stored in the most secure formats cannot be guaranteed forever. 

Most institutional repositories are not clear about just how long data stored in their repositories will remain usable and searchable. Many use phrases like "persistent access" (the University of Pennsylvania's ScholarlyCommons); "long-term preservation" (University of California's e-Scholarship, Texas A&M's Digital Repository, and the University of Michigan's DeepBlue); "continuing access" (the University of Kansas's KU ScholarWorks); or they state that the information will be held "indefinitely" (as at the University of Maryland's DRUM and the University of Florida's Institutional Repository). Penn State's policy is in-line with those offered elsewhere: we assert that "Penn State Libraries and Information Technology Services are committed to providing long-term access to all material submitted to ScholarSphere." One can see why users might be concerned about what statements like these really promise. Very few repositories discuss a timeline for storage (one exception is Purdue's PURR, which allocates repository space based on the nature of the stored data and grant funding, with storage timelines from three years to ten years or the length of the grant).

Electronic storage is limited. For ScholarSphere, these limitations are not an immediate concern, but just as librarians need to cull their physical collections, we know that we might eventually need criteria for determining which items should be preservation priorities. An item's popularity might be one measure of its utility. How many times has the file been downloaded? When was the most recent download? But the utility of a file's content can be just as significant. How can we determine what is obsolete and what will continue to be useful? A dataset downloaded by one person who uses it to publish a new article might be as valuable or more than a document downloaded by one hundred people who only read it once. The availability of the data is also a concern. How can we know whether ScholarSphere content exists elsewhere? Removing an old file from ScholarSphere might wipe it from the Internet entirely, or it might eliminate just one of many instances. 
 
For now we have no straightforward solutions to these long-term problems, but we will continue to analyze and clarify our policies as ScholarSphere evolves. We would love to hear any suggestions or questions you might have!

New User Profile Features in ScholarSphere

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It's January 2013. Did you know there's a new version of ScholarSphere? Check out the footer below:

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In other words, ScholarSphere development and testing continue unabated since the release of the service in September 2011. From this point on, the footer will denote which version of ScholarSphere you're accessing. The version number will be linked to a page in the ScholarSphere site, providing a list of the features new to the service.

In developing v1.3.0, our team has focused in particular on things users can do to customize their research and social-networking presence in ScholarSphere, particularly via the user's profile page. For example:

  • We now have a list of users who have logged into ScholarSphere, which you can access by clicking on the "View users" button on your profile page. The number on the right tells how many files the user has deposited into the service.

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  • Want to keep up to date with colleagues whose works are in ScholarSphere? Just like in FB, Twitter, and G+, you can follow them. Click on a name in the user list to get to a user profile page, and in the upper right side, you'll see a "Follow" button to click on and begin following the colleague.

  • Users can also highlight their research for their profile page. You do this via "my dashboard," where there's now a trophy icon for highlighting such research. The icon turns gold when clicked on for highlighting, and you can highlight up to five files:

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  • The highlighted research then gets listed on your profile page and linked to the ScholarSphere records for them:

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  • Users can also provide their social networking handles, such as for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+:
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These are just some of the new features that have been added to ScholarSphere since November 2011. Features to come include deposit by proxy (such as by a graduate assistant or department administrator), collection functionality, and temporary URLs for sharing private files (such as a draft of a paper) with non-PSU colleagues. 

As always, please provide feedback on our service via the Contact Form. We want to hear from you!

ScholarSphere Feature Updates

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Since the September 24 beta release of ScholarSphere, Penn State's new repository service, we have been busy promoting its features and functionalities through talks and demos with a variety of audiences. To date, we have presented on ScholarSphere for the following groups:

  • College of Agricultural Science Library Committee
  • Commonwealth Campus Libraries (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/locations/ccl.html) at its fall 2012 meeting
  • Faculty Senate Committee on Research
  • IT Leadership Council
  • IT Pro Roundtable
  • Penn State Harrisburg library
  • Records Management Summit, organized by University Archives and held annually
  • University Health Sciences Council

We continue to receive requests for more talks and demos, as well as discussions on use cases for further development (e.g., delivering and managing video content - such as short films created by students in Film & Media Studies - in ScholarSphere). We're working with researchers interested in leveraging ScholarSphere's capabilities for managing research data sets. And we're talking with other libraries about our experiences developing repository services using the Hydra/Fedora framework.

We also have a major new feature to announce! From the start ScholarSphere has enabled deposit of multiple files at once; Google Chrome also makes possible uploading a folder of files. Now users can edit and delete sets of files through our "batch edit and delete" feature (see the screen capture of this new user interface below, showing three files to be edited as a set). Edits - as well as deletion - can be applied across a batch of files. Clicking on a label opens up the field for editing; more than one can be clicked on, edited, and then saved altogether.

batch_edit.pngIn addition, notification updates - e.g., after a user has saved metadata in the Descriptions form - now happen without having to refresh the browser; specifically, the wand icon, which appears on the dashboard after metadata has been saved, goes away when processing is complete.

Features very close to completion include one-time URLs and deposit by proxy:

  • One-time URLs will allow Penn State users to share content they've restricted to the Penn State community or made private, such as unpublished yet ongoing work, with non-Penn-State users, e.g., colleagues at other institutions. This means that a temporary URL will be assigned, through which the file and its metadata record can be accessed during a certain window of time.
  • Deposit by proxy allows an individual, such as a graduate research assistant, to deposit on behalf of another individual, such as a faculty member, or group of individuals, such as a research group. These were features that participants inquired after during our usability testing period in July.

And, last but not least, we can report an update on the collection feature. We have begun working on collection functionality, the most important feature thus far for ScholarSphere, based on user demand. Last week our digital library architect and lead developer presented to the ScholarSphere service team an initial conceptual model of collection functionality and design for discussion and feedback. We talked identifiers, collections metadata, relationships, user interfaces, and roles and requirements, and in the process discussed additional needs - including, as 
suggested by our metadata librarian, the ability to create an empty collection to which objects may be added later.

These are exciting times for ScholarSphere (and additional Hydra-head) development. As always, we welcome feedback from ScholarSphere users, whether it's an issue to report, or an idea for enhancing the service; please use the Contact Form to let us know. We want to hear from you!

Publishing and Curation Services -- Naming it and Making it Work

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Below is a message I sent out to the entire University Libraries today.  Among the many things we hope to accomplish with these shifts is to clearly signify to our users who can help them achieve the goals they have for disseminating their research.   And, with ScholarSphere launching, it's really important to signify who is running point for that activity.  We still have a lot to do to build more service capacity, but this is a start. 

ANNOUNCEMENT:  Publishing and Curation Services

Today the Libraries and ITS launch ScholarSphere, a new service that will help Penn State faculty and students share their scholarly work in a consistent and durable way. Please take a look at http://scholarsphere.psu.edu and help get the word out.

With the launch, I wanted to let you know about some changes we are making in how we provide and promote services to our users within the area of scholarly communications. Effective immediately, Linda Friend and Patricia Hswe collaboratively lead Publishing and Curation Services (PCS). This change rebrands for our users work that Linda and Patricia have been doing but which we have referred to separately as Scholarly Communications Services and Digital Curation.

I encourage you to get in touch with Linda and Patricia about potential digital scholarship projects or requests that you may have or that your users bring to you. Publishing and Curation Services, in consultation with Library faculty, will have responsibility for leading the services, policy, and content development for ScholarSphere. PCS will support digital scholarship by offering our users a primary point of access for a variety of scholarly communications services. The department will work closely with subject specialists, both to foster strong ties with faculty and students and to serve as a resource on issues related to scholarly publishing and digital scholarship. This will provide avenues for more experimentation to inform new programs of collaborative research services to meet faculty and student needs.

We have modified Linda's and Patricia's titles to more readily convey to our users the nature of work and services for which they are responsible.

Linda Friend will now have the title Head, Scholarly Publishing Services and take primary responsibility for those activities. She will continue her work with faculty, students, staff, and librarians to accommodate requests for services such as collecting student research work, starting new publications, or for guidance on issues such as open access. In the coming year Linda will investigate the viability of expanding support for original publications such as journals or conference proceedings.

Patricia Hswe will now have the title Digital Content Strategist and Head, ScholarSphere User Services. She will take primary responsibility for developing new user services in support of ScholarSphere. She will continue her work on data curation services to guide and assist researchers in the lifecycle management of their data sets, advising on best practices and standards, as well as provide curatorial oversight of the University Libraries' digitized collections for enhanced access to online archival and special collections materials.

This is one step of many the Libraries are taking to expand our support for researchers who need assistance with the creation, delivery, and preservation of materials that do not fit into the traditional scholarly communication system. In the coming months you will see much more about Publishing and Curation Services and ScholarSphere. I'm grateful to Linda and Patricia for all the work they have done to date, and will continue to do, in planning and offering support to our University community.


 Mike Furlough 




The Humanities in a Digital Age at Penn State

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Christopher Long recently posted on a new initiative of the Penn State College of Liberal Arts and the University Libraries called The Humanities in a Digital Age.  While that post remains the canonical announcement (to be included in the Norton Anthology of Education Administration Blog Posts), I also sent an announcement out to the Libraries today, which I include below.   We'll have much to say about this in the coming few weeks, but for now, here's the skeleton of the plan. 

Greetings,

A few months ago Susan Welch, Dean of Liberal Arts, asked me to attend a CIC meeting on the topic of digital humanities along with Christopher Long, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, and a small team of Liberal Arts faculty.  The goal of that meeting was spark collaboration across institutions, but in this case it also led to a discussion of opportunities for the Libraries and Liberal Arts to collaborate to promote and/or support digital humanities at Penn State.  Before ALA Dean Welch and Dean Dewey met with Chris Long and I to discuss some specific ways we could work together on this effort.   Chris and I then met just before the 4th to nail down a few more details.  Here they are.

In the coming year, we'll launch an initiative known as "Humanities in the Digital Age," which will promote digital scholarship in the humanities, with the emphasis on "scholarship." Plans are, at this stage, fairly preliminary, but they include three key activities.   First, we will help to build the community of interested researchers across many disciplines and colleges, including the Libraries. This will include programming of various sorts, including workshops, a possible discussion series, and outside speakers.   Secondly, Liberal Arts will identify a few research projects already underway and provide additional seed support to help demonstrate the variety of forms digital scholarship can take.   Third, the Libraries and Liberal Arts will jointly fund a new position on a fixed-term basis.

This position for now has a working title of Digital Humanities Research Designer.  The purpose of this position is to work with researchers to help them define their aims and assist in identifying what tools or techniques could allow them to explore their research questions.  In some ways, this "research designer" role would be analogous to how an instructional designer might help an instructor develop courseware.  There are still a lot of details to work out (like a job description, duties, etc) which will require more input from some of you.

For Liberal Arts, this initiative will help them to support their own researchers and prepare their graduate students to become faculty themselves.  For the Libraries it will allow us to deepen already strong support for the humanities, and to expand our ability to provide digital curation services to that community.

One of the reasons this has been an easy discussion with Deans Dewey and Welch is that we had already begun to explore these collaborations in big and small ways.  Dawn Childress has been discussing the topic with Chris Long and members of his staff, and planning workshops at this year's Liberal Arts Scholarship and Technology Summit event on August 15 and 16.  Dan Mack had been developing digital humanities projects and ideas with colleagues in Classics.  Eric Novotny brought the historian Bill Blair to the Libraries to talk about digitization and, several years later, we have a full-fledged collaboration between the Libraries and the Richards Civil War Center known as The People's Contest.  Dean Welch was already aware of some these activities. 

I welcome your thoughts and questions, and you will hear more about this as it develops.


mike
Penn State Digital Library Technologies and MediaShelf are delighted to
open registration for HydraCamp 2012!  HydraCamp is a full week of training for software developers seeking to learn the habits of agile Rails developers and use the Hydra framework to build interfaces for curating and searching complex content.

     WHEN:  October 8th-12th, 2012
     WHERE: The Atherton Hotel, State College, Pennsylvania

The registration price is set at $375.00 for early registrations
completed by August 17, 2012. The registration price after August 17
is set at $425.00.  The registration fee covers five days of training,
all breakfasts, afternoon snacks & drinks, three lunches, and one
dinner.  A hotel block has been arranged at the site of the training,
the Atherton Hotel, at a rate of $85.00 per night.

There are fifteen spaces available, and we expect them to fill up very
quickly.  We will provide a waitlist after they fill up.  Register at
your earliest convenience to be guaranteed a space:

     http://www.cvent.com/d/mcqzgs

For more information about the program, logistics, and traveling to
central Pennsylvania, see the registration link above.  Please do not
hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

We look forward to seeing you in October!

Archive Journal CFP

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Very excited to post this call for proposals for contributions to Archive Journal (http://archivejournal.net/)! 250-word abstracts, along with 1-page CV, are due July 30. The deadline for completed submissions (based on accepted proposals) will be in early October 2012.

-----------

The editorial board of Archive Journal (archivejournal.net) is pleased to announce an upcoming issue, "Curating the Digital, Curating the Analog," which will explore how data curation shapes and informs library, archival, scholarly, and pedagogical practices.

Understood as the "active and ongoing management of data through its life cycle of interest and usefulness to scholarly and educational activities" (Data Curation Education Program, http://cirss.lis.illinois.edu/CollMeta/dcep.html), data curation encompasses selection and appraisal, description and representation, preservation, and the work of making a resource usable and repurposable. How we store, represent, and provide access to data affects not only those in the world of libraries, archives, and museums, but also scholars, faculty, students, and artists across the disciplines. What role does data play in fields such as the digital humanities, or media studies? How does data curation involve or affect scholarly production, or approaches to pedagogy?

Guest editors, Patricia Hswe and Erin O'Meara, invite submissions on data curation that address new practitioner roles, new types of scholarship, new storage needs, and new stories that are fast emerging. Possible topics for contributions include - but are not limited to - the following:

- Data and archives
- Data curation practices and challenges
- Curation of born-digital materials
- Humanities data curation issues and practices (including management of data for humanities projects)
- Data curation program development
- Legacy data
- Digital forensics
- Curating a mixed media collection (e.g., print and digital)
- Donors and digital donations
- Ethnographic methods and data curation
- Creator attitudes toward, or perceptions of, data curation
- New roles for librarians, archivists, curators, researchers
- Description methods and data models (e.g., metadata, finding aids, ontologies, etc.)
- Tools, applications, platforms

We invite proposals for contributions of 5000-7000 words; shorter essays (2000-4000 words) about new tools or services are also welcome. We encourage proposals that include multimedia components (video, image, or sounds in standard formats), as well as multi-modal or experimental formats; please contact the editors with any questions about submissions in alternative formats. An open-access, peer-reviewed journal, Archive Journal seeks content that speaks to its diverse audience of librarians, scholars, archivists, and technologists (http://archivejournal.net/journal/home/about/).

Authors interested in submitting to this special issue of Archive Journal should send a 250-word abstract about their contribution and a 1-page CV to Patricia Hswe (Digital Collections Curator, Penn State University Libraries) at patricia.hswe@gmail.com and to Erin O'Meara (Archivist, Gates Archive) at omeara.erin@gmail.com by Monday, July 30.

Digital Preservation and ScholarSphere

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When I served as Institutional Repository Coordinator at Duke University, one frequently asked question I received was "What is an Institutional Repository?" My stock answer was that it was an access and discovery platform for Duke faculty and student scholarship as well as born digital institutional records.  The follow-up question almost always had to do with preservation of the content; that answer was usually a referral to a list of preferred formats for deposit.

As we head towards the launch of Penn State's IR, ScholarSphere, these questions now loom large for us. My stock answer at Duke also applies for ScholarSphere as it will offer access and discovery for faculty and student scholarship. ScholarSphere is also built on a robust platform that allows for flexible preservation services. So what is the baseline for content preservation offered by ScholarSphere?

First, all content made available on ScholarSphere will have redundant back-up. All files deposited will get a SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm) checksum which is essentially a digital "fingerprint" in the form of a string of characters that can be generated for any digital file. If the file changes in any way that digital signature will change, indicating the alteration. In addition, ScholarSphere uses FITS (File Information Tool Set) to identify, validate, and extract technical (and some descriptive) metadata from the file, identifying the file type, version, and other information that helps us manage the file. Regular fixity checks will be run against the files to check for changes, such as file corruption. Beyond this initial level of preserving the file for access and discovery, additional preservation services are in the planning stages.

What might these additional preservation services entail? Depending on the Library's commitment to the files submitted, we may look at normalizing files into standard formats to facilitate the migration of files as formats become obsolete, such as migrating all Word files (such as .docx) to a format like PDF/A, the ISO standardized version of Portable Document Format (PDF). A higher level of preservation would be to preserve both the source file and the normalized copy. For some scholarly works such as certain types of data sets, preservation or emulation of the software used to create the files may also be needed to carry the content forward through time.

The main drivers for the adoption of additional preservation services such as these will be policy and resources. Each of the services listed above requires increasing amounts of resources (staff, expertise, and IT tools) to accomplish. Just as we have policies that guide us in the building and preserving of analog collections as well as limited resources to implement those policies, the same is true with the digital content collected for ScholarSphere. Policy can also help creators make informed decisions with regard to technologies and formats used for their work, which could potentially ease the amount of resources required and enhance the longevity of scholarly content. As ScholarSphere evolves, the Library will be prepared to suggest best practices with regard to different documentary types and file formats.


 

 

The repository services project to which other posts have alluded now has a name: ScholarSphere.

Penn State ScholarSphere is a new research repository service offered by the University Libraries and Information Technology Services, enabling Penn State faculty, staff, and students to share their scholarly works such as research datasets, working papers, research reports, and image collections, to name a few examples. ScholarSphere will make these works more discoverable, accessible, usable, and thus broadly recognized and known. 

The ScholarSphere service will help researchers actively manage stored versions of their research and preserve it, ensuring its longevity over time for future generations of scholars to find, use, and build on. The preservation functions include scheduled and on-demand verifications of deposited works, characterization of files to  mitigate future format obsolescence, regular file backups, and replication to disaster recovery sites.

The repository renders research works immediately citable via stable, short URLs and metadata about research is immediately exportable to citation managers. ScholarSphere enables documentation and description of research data for optimal discovery and curation of data through their lifecycle of use and reuse. 

Researchers will be able to share works stored in ScholarSphere with the Penn State community either by sharing directly with specified individuals or with established groups. Researchers will also be able to share each of their files at different access levels including read-only and edit modes, allowing full control over who can view and edit deposited works. 

A trusted institutional service, ScholarSphere has safeguards in place for keeping private research secure and unchanged over time, as researchers warrant, as well as for keeping access restricted to the individual researcher. 

ScholarSphere will be undergoing usability and accessibility testing throughout the summer for a beta release in September of 2012.  Stay tuned for more information about the ScholarSphere launch and about the technologies underlying ScholarSphere.