What is Institutional Scholarship?

To support the tremendous amount of digital material being created on our campuses that is not being preserved, and which is often difficult to access, the TriCollege Libraries of Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges implemented Institutional Scholarship to provide secure, long-term preservation and web-based access to locally-generated digital content.

Based on DSpace, the open source institutional repository application developed by MIT and Hewlett Packard and used by more than 700 institutions worldwide, Institutional Scholarship will help manage important aspects of the academic and cultural heritage of the TriColleges, including faculty research and scholarship, audio and video recordings of college events, performances in theater, dance and music, work associated with alumni, and student projects and theses.

How Does Institutional Scholarship Work?

Institutional Scholarship is able to support such a wide array of materials because a number of key components are customizable. Each collection can have its own privacy and access settings, schema for descriptive metadata, procedures for submitting and approving new items, and some elements of the web design are also easily tailored. Additionally, Institutional Scholarship supports full-text search, contextual browsing, web-based submission of new items, and web browser playback for audio and video.

I Have a Collection for Institutional Scholarship

If you are associated with one of the TriColleges and know of a collection that should be preserved and made accessible to either the campus or the broader community please contact the library most closely associated with the collection or email trico-admin at brynmawr.edu. We will work with you to determine the best digital formats for your collection, how to describe it, what level of privacy and access is appropriate, and the workflow for getting up and running. If you have an analog collection that might benefit from digital conversion and preservation let us know and we will determine the best conversion procedures.

Register with Institutional Scholarship

Registering with Institutional Scholarship allows you to sign up for email updates when new items are added to collections and to submit items to collections, if authorized. Please note that registering will not give you access to restricted items. Go to the registration page to sign up.