Location
Dover Library Large Conference Room
Start Date
6-6-2025 2:00 PM
End Date
6-6-2025 2:30 PM
Description
Weeding—it’s not just for overgrown gardens and neglected bookshelves. As institutional repositories age, they accumulate digital clutter: orphaned collections, outdated records, and the occasional relic that makes you wonder, why did we ever upload this? At Georgia Southern University, our repository, Georgia Southern Commons, recently celebrated its eleventh birthday—a milestone marked not with cake, but with a long-overdue audit of its 1,900+ structures and 150,000+ items records.
However, conducting a large-scale repository weeding project isn’t as simple as hitting "delete" (tempting as that may be). Without built-in visualization tools in Digital Commons, tracking down what belongs where—and whether it still belongs at all—feels a bit like spelunking without a headlamp. During this session, we’ll share how we tackled these challenges, including our strategies for making sense of the repository’s complex structure, identifying what to preserve, and (perhaps most importantly) deciding what to gracefully retire.
Specifically, we’ll share how we audited Georgia Southern Commons to manually collect and contextualize each structure’s visibility settings, parent/child relationships, and content, both native and collected. Then we’ll share how we used this data to identify candidate structures for immediate deletion, consolidation then deletion, or redescription and regrouping. Finally, we’ll offer best practices we see emerging from this project, which has so far allowed us to delete 550+ structures to date.
Beyond decluttering, our findings offer a roadmap for other institutions struggling with repository sprawl. We address key gaps in existing literature on institutional repository weeding, particularly the lack of practical guidance for repository platforms that lack effective visualization tools. Our experience recommends best practices for maintaining a repository’s relevance, usability, and long-term sustainability—because a well-maintained repository is a happy repository (and a happy repository makes for happy librarians, administrators, and stakeholders). Whether you're facing your own digital hoarding crisis or just looking for proactive strategies, join us to discuss this important topic, and perhaps for a little catharsis.
Digital Hoarders Anonymous: Facing—and Fixing—Clutter in a Mature Repository
Dover Library Large Conference Room
Weeding—it’s not just for overgrown gardens and neglected bookshelves. As institutional repositories age, they accumulate digital clutter: orphaned collections, outdated records, and the occasional relic that makes you wonder, why did we ever upload this? At Georgia Southern University, our repository, Georgia Southern Commons, recently celebrated its eleventh birthday—a milestone marked not with cake, but with a long-overdue audit of its 1,900+ structures and 150,000+ items records.
However, conducting a large-scale repository weeding project isn’t as simple as hitting "delete" (tempting as that may be). Without built-in visualization tools in Digital Commons, tracking down what belongs where—and whether it still belongs at all—feels a bit like spelunking without a headlamp. During this session, we’ll share how we tackled these challenges, including our strategies for making sense of the repository’s complex structure, identifying what to preserve, and (perhaps most importantly) deciding what to gracefully retire.
Specifically, we’ll share how we audited Georgia Southern Commons to manually collect and contextualize each structure’s visibility settings, parent/child relationships, and content, both native and collected. Then we’ll share how we used this data to identify candidate structures for immediate deletion, consolidation then deletion, or redescription and regrouping. Finally, we’ll offer best practices we see emerging from this project, which has so far allowed us to delete 550+ structures to date.
Beyond decluttering, our findings offer a roadmap for other institutions struggling with repository sprawl. We address key gaps in existing literature on institutional repository weeding, particularly the lack of practical guidance for repository platforms that lack effective visualization tools. Our experience recommends best practices for maintaining a repository’s relevance, usability, and long-term sustainability—because a well-maintained repository is a happy repository (and a happy repository makes for happy librarians, administrators, and stakeholders). Whether you're facing your own digital hoarding crisis or just looking for proactive strategies, join us to discuss this important topic, and perhaps for a little catharsis.