Consolidating Institutional Repositories

Room A

The University of South Florida was comprised of 3 separately accredited campuses. The Florida legislature mandated a consolidation of 3 campuses by July 1, 2020. Two of the campuses, Tampa and St. Petersburg, had their own bepress Digital Commons institutional repositories. Due to this consolidation, the two instances of Digital Commons had to be combined under one instance. The St. Petersburg campus of USF was using the institutional repository for faculty work, student work, community outreach collections, conferences, and digital collections. At the same time, digital collections on the Tampa campus decided to move their special collections from Sobek, an archival platform, to Digital Commons as well. The new combined institutional repository will house faculty and student work, journals, conferences, community outreach projects, and special digital collections. In this presentation, we will describe the process of migrating two repositories and an archival platform into one instance of Digital Commons. We hope a description of this project, along with information about workflows and project management, will help other institutions going through similar migration projects.