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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 3RD APRIL, 2016
A few months ago,
UWI Press announced that 250 books
from its catalogue had been digitized and would be available
as an online library for subscribers.The Alma Jordan Library
(AJL) at the St. Augustine Campus was responsible for
developing the technical platform on which this e-book
library will be hosted. In many ways this collaborative
project is in keeping with the Library’s drive to help shape
and support the scholarly communication and publishing
landscape across the University and the Caribbean.
“Features of the new site developed by the AJL include
responsive design, tailoring the attractive and functional
interface to any device; turning pages; and such tools
as advanced search filters, social sharing, and reading
recommendations using linked data and elements of the
semantic web,” says the new Campus Librarian, Frank
Soodeen, with some pride.
In a sense it was the kind of project they had been
anticipating for 16 years at the AJL, ever since Soodeen
moved the in-house available only library catalogue to the
world-wide web and began digitizing content for student use
and access. The first digitization project involved scanning
UWI past exam papers and making them available via the
Library’s web site as a solution to the ever increasing demand
for the limited number of print copies that were housed in
the Reserves Collection. “The database that was developed
now holds just over 13,000 past papers covering the years
1993 to 2016,” he says.
The digitization programme at the AJL evolved over
the years and a repository had to be established to house
the digital objects created. The UWISpace institutional
repository was therefore set up in 2009 to capture and
preserve digitized content not only from the AJL collections,
but also the intellectual record of the St. Augustine Campus.
Frank Soodeen, Campus Librarian: Despite the move to e-resources,
students are still visiting their university library quite often and
spending significant time there when they do.
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In the UWISpace archive there is the preciousWest Indiana
material, which includes special collections, UWI post
graduate e-theses, the recently acquired audio news reports
from the BBCCaribbean Service, the Goldberg Collection of
postcards; faculty material, pre-prints and post publication
versions of scholarly articles produced by the University
community.The repository was eventually extended to allow
submission of digitized content from all the UWI campuses
as it was known that university research in most instances
being born digital, there was no framework for managing
the archiving and proper preservation of this content.
UWISpace now holds more than 17,000 digital objects,
complete with metadata records that describe each item
stored. Content management portals such as UWISpace
have really opened the door for libraries to be agile,
efficient and ubiquitous; for UWI it has meant support for
administrative, teaching and research programmes.
“We want to push this model,” says Soodeen. “The
Library now has two faces – one of brick and mortar and
the online presence.”
It has been about six months since Soodeen took up
the position of Campus Librarian after the retirement of
Jennifer Joseph. His priorities for the next five years include
“engagement and outreach, harnessing and distributing
Caribbean content, organizational learning and growth,
prudent fiscal management and developing a culture of
accountability and assessment,” he says.
He’s already done some physical work in what he
describes as “re-engineering spaces” to add facilities like
a research commons – spaces for undergraduate students,
collaborative learning rooms, media centres and general
improvements to enhance the brick and mortar element,
but he has a clear idea of the role of a university library in
today’s world of technology.
UWISpace
now holds more than
17,000 digital objects, complete
with metadata records that
describe each item stored
