What happened?

Cornell University Library is migrating the ILR School (DigitalCommons@ILR) and School of Hotel Administration (The Scholarly Commons) repositories into eCommons, its university-wide platform for open scholarship. The project was completed at the end of 2020.

Support for faculty, centers, institutes, and other units within the ILR School and the School of Hotel Administration will continue to be be provided by the Catherwood Library and Nestlé Library staff, respectively.

Why did DigitalCommons@ILR and The Scholarly Commons migrate to a new platform?

The change was necessitated by budget constraints, but has benefits beyond the substantial financial savings. The benefits include:

  • Standards-based identifiers that enable reliable, long-term citation and support additional functionality such as alt-metrics
  • Long-term preservation of content
  • Excellent performance with Internet search engines
  • Greater flexibility in setting up and managing collections
  • Use of an open source and community-governed repository platform
  • Cornell-focused support for the platform and its users, provided by Cornell University Library.

Will you continue to collect and upload my works as you have in the past?

The Catherwood Library and Nestlé Library remain committed to collecting and uploading your works just as we have in the past. You will see no change in our service model: faculty can continue to send their CVs or new items as they are published, and units within both schools can send their respective library their publications for upload.

I have been using the Selected Works feature of the current platform. Can I continue?

When our contract with bepress ended, the Selected Works pages of Cornell faculty were hidden. This means that your Selected Works page is no longer locatable by search engine. If you would like your page to remain findable, please contact Jim DelRosso at jdd10@cornell.edu. If you do so, your page can be made available with its original URL, but the branding of each school will be replaced with standard Selected Works branding. Library staff will no longer be able to access or edit the page on your behalf, but you will retain editing rights.

We're happy to help you identify alternatives to Selected Works. Using your ORCID iD to unambiguously link your work to your identity is one such option.

How will this migration affect the download statistics of my work?

We migrated download data from the current platform into eCommons, and it will appear in each item's description. eCommons download statistics will also be also available for each item.

While eCommons does collect and display download statistics for items in the repository, the eCommons platform does not currently support an author dashboard or automated reports of monthly statistics. Please do not hesitate to reach out to the Catherwood Library or Nestlé Library with questions about usage statistics for your materials.

Will links to items in the current SHA and ILR repositories be redirected to eCommons?

We have put in place URL redirects from the landings pages for items in the current ILR and SHA repositories to their respective landing pages in eCommons. We have also put in place URL redirects at the top level of each repository, and the collections within them.

We also notified webmasters (and other stakeholders known to CUL staff) in advance of the migration, so they could update links on their websites.

Will the Scholarship@Cornell Law also be migrated?

Not at this time.

Can I get more information please?

Absolutely!

General questions about eCommons may be directed to the eCommons team.