Vision for Water Resources of New York State and the Great Lakes collection

Vision for Water Resources of New York State and the Great Lakes collection:

The Studies on Water Resources of New York State and the Great Lakes  community in Digital Commons @Brockport seeks to be the major resource for scientists and other researchers in this field. It is modeled after the Cornell ILR Digital Commons, which houses all types of documents pertaining to Industrial and Labor Relations in NYS.

The Water Resources community currently has 2 collections. The first and largest collection consists of 80+ Technical Reports. These were funded by grants from Soil and Water Conservation Districts across NY, and written primarily by Dr. Makarewicz and graduate students from Environmental Science and Biology. These reports were to: a) determine the sources and locations of pollution in local waterways, b) recommend best practices for watershed management, and c) provide follow up monitoring to assess successes and report areas still in need of improvement. A second, smaller collection consists of relevant journal articles virtually gathered from Environmental Science and Biology faculty publications, as well as newspaper and newsletter clippings.

I propose adding a third collection to this community, government documents from our print collection. Here is the plan I would use:

1.      With the assistance of Dr. Joseph Makarewicz, identify essential government documents from our print collection.

2.      Using student help, determine which of these already exist online.

a.      If a document exists in a government database, then add only metadata and a link out to the document. It could then be potentially weeded from our collection.

b.      If a document is not found to be online, set aside to be scanned at a later date. It could then be added to the repository, and potentially weeded from our collection.

Why is this an important part of our repository?

1.      The College at Brockport has a long history of supporting Lake Ontario Research. This community supports that initiative.

2.      2013 is the next cycle year for Intensive Monitoring of Lake Ontario. There have been attempts in the past to develop a repository where existing data could be searched and new data deposited. This has never been successful, according to Dr. Makarewicz, because there has never been a library willing to take a leadership role in maintaining and updating such a repository.

3.      In many ways, this community represents the body of scholarly work produced by Dr. Joseph Makarewicz, a Distinguished Service Professor Department of Environmental Science and Biology, who will soon be approaching retirement. To be able to provide an archive for his work, especially the grey literature that may otherwise disappear, is one of the important purposes of a scholarly repository.

4.      Finally, this community has begun to garner attention on a national level, through our repository provider, bepress. They have expressed an interest in sharing this community as an outstanding example of a repository extending their outreach beyond the doors of their local institution. Such attention will serve to drive more traffic to our site, and bring more attention to The College.