Digital Commons

Removing an item, another such request. This time using the "remove ir..." command and burying the pdf, leaving only the metadata, wasn't enough, the author replied back and said they wanted the whole record deleted. I have asked Angeline at BePress how to do that.


We are talking internally, Pam and I, about this. Pam suggested we need to establish a policy and she's right, we do. I suspect this will continue and be a small but occasional thing. There's a lot of content in there now, many items have been there a few years and more, and there are a few authors noticing that their items are being viewed, downloaded etc. and for various reasons become uncomfortable with that.

Bio info for John Collins

Someone researching an early '70s basketball player from here contacted athletics asking for info, what high school did he come from etc. They said he was '72, but all I saw was a John Collins '74 in alum directories. Were a number of mentions in Stylus of a John Collins as playing basketball '70-72, not after. None mentioned his background. Shared what I had with athletics, suggested a person in advancement who is good at search the back part of Banner for old student records.

Martin "Marty" Rogers

Had a request via email asking about his "memoirs." I'd forgot we had this, but we do have 2 copies of "Grandpa Stories, The Life and Times of Martin H. Rogers," as told to Susan E. Edmunds. She was the daughter of James Edmunds, English, and family friend of Rogers. She taught in the Music Department here 1963-1983. One copy is in the stacks, one in the RG26 bio files.

Writers Forum

Very interesting meeting with Jim Wharton, English, prof who is in charge of Writers Forum, and John Schroth, owner of Media Transfer Service in East Rochester. John's company has done the digitization of a number of our WF tapes. Jim wants to step up the pace and get a CLIR Mellon Foundation grant to start doing much larger numbers of the tapes.


John's comments lent much support to the concerns for digitization and digital preservation. For example, not only is the life span of many video tape and audio tape formats limited, we are nearing the end of their lifespans at this point. The machines to run them are becoming old and worn out too, and the companies making them, or parts for them, have mostly gone out of business or into other lines of manufacturing. In other words, if one wishes to digitize old VHS, Betamax, reel to reels and so forth, it would be smart to do it sooner than later.


As for digital preservation, the grants specifically asks by what means will the digitized versions of the materials be maintained. John spoke at length about options, he is currently working with Geneseo for example, they got a grant from this fund and are maintaining the digital material on a set of LTO tape drives, as well as using cloud storage. We need something more than a RAID drive sitting on a back office PC where it is never checked...

1992 Wrestling Team

Advancement looking for team photo of this Nat'l Championship level team. Found one, scanned, and emailed to them.

Hartwell Hall

Secretary to the Dean of Business emailed asking about the history of the building. They have a nice print they framed of Hartwell, and they want to put together some sort of text document to put up with the photo. Supplied with links to a couple online things, like the 1940 Saga spread on the "new building," and shared some photos too, as well as some historical context.

Edward Stephany

Edward Stephany taught mathematics here 1947-1980. He has passed away, but his wife Arline is turning 100 soon, and a party is planned for her. Advancement wanted some info on them, have sent some, will look for a little more. It was a good question, I didn't happen to have a file on them!

Taking down a thesis

Someone who had an English thesis that was a creative writing piece emailed and was concerned that their thesis was being downloaded, possibly to pirate and sell. After thinking about it and looking through the DC blog etc., I decided to take it down for the time being.


For future reference if you being up a file and go to revise it, there is an option to only show the metadata, not the pdf itself. The pdf is still there, and to have it show again you would just check the appropriate box. The other option, to "remove" the item, doesn't actually delete it, but it does store in the "back end," and if ever wanted to repost it would have to ask BePress staff to do it for you.