Constellation is the open-access digital repository of scholarly work produced by Dominican University students, faculty and staff. Constellation is currently used by Dominican University and Elmhurst College, and is available for all institutions in LIBRAS, a consortium of private liberal arts colleges in the Chicago area. The LIBRAS name is not used on the Constellation site. Constellation resides on a Dominican server.
Communities and Collections
The Dominican Constellation community contains sub-communities. Sub-communities are sub-units designed to contain materials with some characteristic in commons such as schools or offices. Each sub-community contains one or more collections. Example:
Community: Dominican University
Sub-community: Dominican University Rosary College of Arts & Sciences
Collection: Dominican University Honors Projects
Each sub-community and collection name must start with Dominican University.
The community administrator, working with the Academic IT Committee, administers from other participating institutions, and other appropriate departments or individuals, is responsible for:
• setting community and collection policies, including:
• what sorts of items are appropriate to a particular collection
• what electronic formats are acceptable in a particular collection
• who may add items to a particular collection
• who may view items in a particular collection
• withdrawing items (see Withdrawing Items section)
• customizing community home page and all sub-pages with institution logo
• deciding policy and procedure
• training users
Submissions
Submissions must be authored or sponsored by Dominican-affiliated faculty, staff or students, and should be scholarly in nature.
Submissions must be complete and ready for distribution.
Suggested materials for submission include article pre- and post-prints, supplemental article materials such as data sets and photographs, theses and dissertations, honors projects, learning objects, working papers, conference proceedings, annual reports, departmental publications, and archival materials.
Items, collections and communities can be restricted to specific users, with the approval of the community administrator. It is recommended that all items in Constellation be open access.
Content Descriptions/Metadata
Each sub-community or collection can have a customized submission process in which particular metadata fields are required, or in which a standard metadata template is attached to each item.
Descriptions should be as complete as possible. Each description must include a title and a publication date. It is recommended that author and abstract also be required.
Withdrawing Items
Constellation is intended to provide long-term, permanent access to submissions. Withdrawing items is discouraged. There may be times, however, when it is necessary to remove items because of, for example, copyright infringement, inaccuracy or plagiarism. When the community administrator removes an item, the item’s description should remain as a placeholder. A brief statement, such as “removed from view at request of author” should be added to the description.
If an author publishes an updated version of a work, that updated version should be uploaded along with the original submission. The original submission should not be removed.
Licensing
When submitting content, an author will be asked to agree to a non-exclusive distribution license giving Dominican the right to reproduce, convert and distribute submissions. By agreeing to the license, the author also states that s/he owns the copyright of the work or has otherwise secured permission to deposit the work in Constellation.
Authors should refer to SHERPA RoMEO for copyright and self-archiving policies for most major publishers. Authors are encouraged to use a Creative Commons (CC) license, available through the CC web site or through Constellation, or the SPARC author addendum.
Preservation
Constellation will support as many file formats as possible. All files uploaded to Constellation will be retrievable. The server is backed up daily. Sub-communities must back up their submissions in their own departments.
Each uploaded file will be assigned one of the following categories:
• Supported:
Dominican will fully support the file format, and will migrate or emulate files as needed. Supported files will likely include, for example, PDF, JPEG and HTML.
• Known:
Dominican recognizes the format, but cannot guarantee full support. Popular proprietary formats, such as Microsoft Office documents, will likely fall in this category.
• Unsupported:
Dominican cannot identify or sustain the file. Dominican may choose to work with authors to convert files to supported formats.
Dominican University will not convert files into supported formats for other participating institutions.
