John Willinsky waited for a couple of weeks after the fall quarter had started to give the Graduate School of Education (GSE) faculty and students some time to settle in to their routines before sending out the big news:

The news of the collaboration between the Open Archive and the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) has been well-received by the GSE community, and served as a reminder to some faculty to deposit their recent publications, so the number of open access works in the collection continues to rise.

The SDR Team is always delighted to work with folks at Stanford with troves of content of long-term scholarly value: after all, that's what the SDR is all about. Yet the GSE Open Archive project is particularly special, because of the innovative work done by the GSE Open Archive team to leverage the benefits of the SDR's open architecture for their own purposes when designing a new front-end to the collection. Check it out: http://openarchive.stanford.edu/. 

Built in Drupal, this site provides a customized view of the Open Archive's contents, one distinct from the SearchWorks view of the collection, and one tailored for and focused on the GSE community itself. This was important to Willinsky, the Khosla Family Professor of Education and the pioneering faculty member behind the Open Archive. With the new site, the GSE team can promote and control the presentation of their collection as they wish, while the long-term management of the content becomes a separate concern left to the SDR, a library service and supporting infrastructure which will persist at Stanford long after Drupal and other web content management systems. 

How it works: After the initial migration of the Open Archive to the SDR last spring, the metadata for each article was programmatically harvested from the PURLs and then indexed in the Drupal site for display and linking back to the SDR for article access. As a new article is deposited, it is a simple matter of creating a new node in the GSE site and entering the SDR PURL as a feed to automatically populate the node with metadata and links. Wilson Wang, GSE Web Developer, and Shawn Nak-Kyung Kim, GSE Academic Technology Specialist, are responsible for this fine work. Confident that this functionality will be popular, we are discussing with Stanford Web Services how to extend and generalize this SDR-to-Drupal interoperability for adoption by other depositors and units on campus.

The new Open Archive site is bound to heighten awareness of SDR services and to promote the open access movement at Stanford. Preservation and open access go hand in hand. Willinsky says, "As the first Education school in the country, and the first unit at Stanford, with an open access policy and archive dating back to 2008, we are delighted to now be able to have our faculty's and graduate students' research made public and preserved through the Stanford University Library's Digital Repository."