The repository archives and preserves the intellectual and creative output of its faculty, students (both graduate and undergraduate), and community partners working on projects in collaboration with UWG. UWG Administrative departments, organizations, and student activity groups who have materials of enduring value for preserving the institutional history and work of UWG may work with UWG's Special Collections Department to deposit materials in WISE.
Because materials in WISE are open access, when one transitions from UWG, be it via retirement, graduation, or a career move, the materials deposited in WISE will still be visible and accessible. A Net ID logon is not required to view materials in WISE.
Materials in WISE are Open Access and not hidden behind UWG's institutional log-in scheme. That means that links to items in WISE may be shared with those outside of UWG. Go ahead and share links to items in WISE with colleagues in the wider academy, alumni, residents in the local community, and the general public.
The individual records with their links for materials in WISE also appear in the Ingram Library's main Online Public Access Catalog (search engine) as well as the Georgia Knowledge Repository. Thus when researchers are searching those catalogs, materials from WISE will appear in results.
At the present time Ingram Library has only begun exploring options for optimization at the item level for general web crawlers. On rare occasions, one-off items have appeared in general internet searches, but we are not actively executing any formal optimization to promote the links to items in the Repository.
Each record in WISE receives a permanent URL (with a "handle" prefix). This means that even if UWG migrates to a new repository software platform, the URLs will still work. This is a great benefit for those who include links to WISE materials in courses or use them in professional documents such as CVs, personal professional websites, job applications and so forth. Ingram Library and UWG is committed to the permanent preservation in the Digital Repository.
By depositing materials in WISE, one is participating in efforts to make scholarship freely accessible to fellow researchers and students worldwide, particularly in situations where there are barriers to affordability.
If you are curious about the impact/influence of your scholarship, there is rudimentary usage data that is available at the item level. For faculty members preparing tenure or promotion portfolios, please note that this data is simplistic and is subject to the methodological pitfalls and concerns characteristic of click counters.
If you have paid for open access on a publisher's site or have submitted your materials to a an open access repository recognized in your field, the requirement for faculty to submit articles to WISE is waved. That being said, we hope you might consider also submitting to WISE since WISE also serves as a permanent record of the scholarship of UWG as a collective body. Future researchers, for instance, will be able to search the collection to explore whether there are specific UWG schools of thought, UWG specific research trends and so forth. Having a one-stop shop for UWG related scholarship is also a boon for UWG based researchers and stakeholders.
In the case of UWG Faculty, if you choose to have us create an account for you in order to upload items yourself , those will typically be available in a few moments. Thumbnails, however, may take up to a week for the system to generate. If, after a week a thumbnail hasn't been produced, please be in contact with Beth M. Sheppard, who manages the repository. It may be the case that the particular file may require Ingram Library staff to manually generate and upload a thumbnail.
Processing time varies depending on file types, the need for copyright clearance (rights review), and existing projects in queue. Faculty scholarship, student work for which submission to WISE is part of a project that will be graded by faculty, and grant projects with specific deadlines imposed by funders will take priority in any existing queue.
The platform for WISE periodically runs a process that automatically generates thumbnails. Typically the thumbnail will be the first page of multi-page items. In sets (multiple items uploaded as part of one record), the image will default to the first page of the first item that was uploaded in the set. If you have different requirements, please reach out to Ingram Library for assistance.
Ingram Library trusts the professional judgment of the individual submitting material to WISE. You are free to submit any items to which you have the legal right and which do not violate any local laws or UWG policies. Please keep in mind that materials in WISE are openly accessible to a wide audience and should be selected with an eye toward enhancing your own reputation and that of your division/department/school at UWG.
So far we have successfully tested WISE primarily with JPEGs, PDFs, XLS, DOC and other similar file extensions. The file formats typical of dissertations, articles, conference papers, and images should pose no difficulties. The platform documentation does indicate that the software is also capable of handling media and datasets, though those items have not been tested and storage limits may come into play. Please feel free to contact us if there are format questions or you have excessively large files.
While we encourage immediate and unhindered open access, we recognize that occasionally publishers or sponsors require that free versions of a publication or sponsored output be "embargoed" or inaccessible for a period of time. Alternatively, some research may be of a sensitive nature that must be kept confidential prior to being released to the general public. We can accommodate these situations in our software by repressing an item for length of time before it appears. Please contact the repository administrator for assistance in these special cases.