AURA — Alfred University Research and Archive

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What is AURA?  No, not aura, a distinctive atmosphere, or an energy field from a living being, but AURA.  AURA stands for the Alfred University Research and Archive.  It’s Alfred University’s own digital repository, a place to discover the past and inform the future.
  What is a digital repository?

  • A means of storing and providing access to digital content (research, scholarship and documents of historical significance)
  • Provides a stable, well-managed, permanent archive for digital scholarly and research materials of enduring value produced by faculty, staff, and students
  • Supports research, learning and administrative processes
  • Includes a wide range of content: research data, meeting minutes, newsletters, theses and dissertations, published articles, technical reports, conference papers, historical information, etc.

For example, this newletter of the Science Fiction Club, Lanruojifics, Fall 2002
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What are the benefits of a digital repository?

  • Content can be searched full-text, across all documents
  • Allows the content to be shared locally and globally
  • Allows wide and rapid dissemination of intellectual output, thereby raising awareness of Alfred University to a wider audience
  • Stores and organizes the plethora of digital documents created on campus in one place, accessible from anywhere
  • Supports a wide range of file types (text, images, video, data sets, etc.)
  • Access to content can be restricted as needed
  • Required for researchers applying for certain types of federal funding
  • Usage can be tracked for statistical purposes

Why not just put this material into Blackboard?

  • AURA makes content available to external audiences (open access availability)
  • AURA’s content can be indexed by search engine harvesters (such as Google)
  • AURA’s content is organized into collections and subcollections
  • BlackBoard was designed as a course management system; not a document warehouse. It doesn’t allow for searching across documents and doesn’t manage collections or access to them as well as AURA does.

How can you help to build AURA?

  • ·         Submit your club’s publications and meeting minutes for inclusion in AURA
  • ·         Submit your publications and research to AURA.
  • ·         Submit publications from your program, division, school and college.  Help us keep AU’s institutional memory strong in the digital era.

Want to check out AURA right now?
http://aura.alfred.edu
— Steve Crandall