Question: “We are hoping to store, organize, and access a collection of texts in a central location here on campus. How do we go about housing materials on e-Commons, which we’ve heard is a good place for this sort of thing? ”
Answer: Ecommons–www.ecommons.cornell.edu–could be a great online home for your project. It’s perfect for permanently storing anything that isn’t freely available on the web, and it also creates a permanent url for everyything so you never worry that the links will change. Anything on ecommons is also fully searchable by Google. Remember, though, that the documents must generally be either a. created/owned by you, or b. created by somone who’s given the ok for you to post them, or c. public docs that are free of copyright.
A little background, with a short intro to ecommons unique phraseology. Mann Library has recently helped CCE create a site, or community, on ecommons for cooperative extension documents @ http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/1440. WIthin the the CCE ecommons community are a # of subcommunities (horticulture, energy, etc) and each of those subcommunities can contain any number of subcollections. Don’t worry right now if none of that makes sense. The best thing to do first is to check out the CCE site and determine if your material fits naturally into an existing subcommunity, or if you think you’ll need a new subcommunity.
Once you have your material ready to go and have checked out Ecommons, we’re happy to help you get set up and start adding to your collection. Send an email to Jim Morris-Knower at jpk15@cornell.edu and we’ll go from there.
great stuff!