20 Cool Things You Didn’t Know about Digital Commons: Part Three

Think you know everything you can do with Digital Commons? Think again. We’re constantly impressed by the hard work and innovation of our Digital Commons community, and we wanted to show off twenty of the many amazing and creative ways you’re using the platform to help support the needs of your campuses. Stay tuned for part four!

Extra-Large Collections
More and more libraries (not just those with ETD collections) are faced with the responsibility of making enormous collections available online, and they are turning to Digital Commons.

  • Example: Brigham-Young University Law School’s 30,000 public domain court briefs

Embedded Features
We’ve already talked about how Digital Commons supports all kinds of embeddable features, from audio and video players to commenting widgets, but did you know that there’s already an embedded PDF viewer built into Digital Commons?

Cover Pages
Automatically generated, institutionally-branded cover pages are one of the staples of Digital Commons, but did you know that you can customize them further with images? Many subscribers are choosing to add images of their school’s logos to further enhance their repository’s branding.

Altmetrics
Have your faculty members been asking about Altmetrics? Typically used for journals, Altmetrics are simple to set up. Once enabled, readers and authors can easily view statistics on Tweets, mentions, and more on an article’s homepage.

Buttons
We can easily turn text into a simple, clickable button for you, but some libraries are even designing their own buttons! Our example below in the sidebar, the University of Wollongong, created customized “Author Badges.” The badges, which come in four different colors, link back to a faculty’s SelectedWorks page and can easily be added to any website or online profile with simple cut and paste HTML code.

To learn more about how you might include these features in your Digital Commons repository, contact Consulting Services at support@dc.bepress.com.