Those of you who have been working with Digital Commons for a while likely already know about our Batch Upload feature—which allows administrators to upload multiple records at once via a special Excel or XML spreadsheet—but Batch Upload has a sister feature that you might not be using to its full potential. Batch Revise provides admins with a spreadsheet of all the metadata from a given collection, allowing you to easily and efficiently edit existing metadata for a large number of works in one place.
Our bepress Consulting Services Batch Revise Experts suggest three situations in which Batch Revise can be a particularly useful tool:
- Typically, Administrators can set default disciplines on the configuration page that will populate the submission form and authors can choose to either keep them or remove them. Admins have the ability to quickly add or update different disciplines for individual articles with the Batch Revise feature if certain disciplines are not otherwise available.
- Batch Revise is a great way to clean up sloppy or incorrect metadata that may have been entered by a student worker or outside partner and to make sure that metadata is being entered in a consistent manner across library staff.
- For schools that are using Digital Commons to manage ETD submissions or schools that are letting students self-submit their ETDs, using Batch Revise to identify which steps in the submission process students had the most trouble with can be extremely useful in making instructions clearer for the following year’s submissions.
For more information about how Batch Revise can help improve workflows at your library or to enable the feature in your Digital Commons repository, contact your Consulting Services Rep at support@dc.bepress.com.
