QSpace Community & Collection Policies

The Queen's QSpace digital repository is a partnership among Queen's communities, Library, and IT Services. QSpace content consists of collections produced by Queen's communities. The collections are managed, preserved, and made accessible by Queen's Library and IT Services through QSpace. Some of the collections may be subject to institutional guidelines defined by Queen's University administration. As in all partnerships, it is important that all QSpace stakeholders understand and agree to the policies, guidelines, and procedures required to build a QSpace repository. The following draft policy statements will be developed over the life of the project with input from various parties.

What is a QSpace community?

A QSpace "Community" is a unit at Queen's University that produces or sponsors the generation of digital materials resulting from research, teaching and academic support activities, has a defined leader, has long-term stability, and can assume responsibility for setting Community policies. Examples of communities may be departments, research centres, institutes, etc. Each community should, if possible, assign a coordinator who can work with QSpace staff. Groups wishing to establish a QSpace Community that do not fall into this definition will be considered on a case-by-case basis by the QSpace Steering Committee.

What responsibilities does a QSpace Community take on?

With the support of the QSpace Coordinator and your Library liaison, a QSpace community agrees to:

• obtain copyright permission for content submitted when copyright owner is other than author(s) or Queen's University
• arrange for submission and description of content
• make decisions about community and collection definitions
• notify QSpace of organizational changes affecting submissions
• reply to annual reconfirmation of community information
• understand and observe University policies relevant to QSpace, and educate community submitters regarding these policies
• decide upon a submission workflow for each collection.

What rights does a QSpace Community retain?

A QSpace community retains the right to:

• decide policy regarding content to be submitted (within QSpace guidelines)
• decide who may submit content within the community; student works approved for submission by a community must be checked.
• limit access to content at the item level either to Queen's University only or to specific individuals or groups
• receive a copy of submitted content upon request
• remove items and collections, as outlined in the Withdrawal Policy
• approve addition of or elimination of sub-communities
• decide on content for customization of community or collection content pages.

What are Queen's Library's responsibilities?

QSpace agrees to:

• retain content accepted to QSpace
• distribute content according to community decisions
• preserve content using accepted preservation techniques
• provide access to QSpace research, where required
• notify communities of significant changes to content, e.g. format migration
• if Queen's University Library ceases to support QSpace, return collections to existing communities or maintain, under Queees, collections of communities that have ceased to exist.

What are Queen's Library's rights?

QSpace retains the right to:

• redistribute or amend metadata for items in QSpace
• refuse or de-accession items or Collections under certain circumstances - as outlined in the Withdrawal Policy
• renegotiate terms of original agreement with Communities
• perform appraisal for long-term archiving when Communities cease to exist or within thirty years of the creation of a Collection
• move Collections to reflect current understanding between QSpace and Communities
• migrate items if format is in danger of obsolescence
• set quotas (size of files, number of items) to determine what constitutes free service and consider possibility of charging ry files.
• Consider whether to charge fees for activities requiring extensive centralized support from QSpace (e.g. large amount of de-accessioning)

Withdrawal of items from QSpace

QSpace is intended to be a permanent archive, offering reliable ongoing access to works by the Queen's community. However, it may be necessary to remove items from the repository upon special request.

• Exception. Deposit of Queen's graduate theses is mandated by the University. These theses can be restricted from all access, at the request of the student, for a period of time specified in the School of Graduate Studies and Research policies. When the restriction is lifted such theses will be publicly accessible.

Removal

In most circumstances it will be desirable to remove items from view, but to avoid loss of the historical record, such transactions will be traced in the form of a note in the <Description.provenance> field of the Dublin Core record. The content of the note should be one of the following:

• "removed from view at request of the author"
• "removed from view at Queen's University's discretion"
• "removed from view at Queen's University Library's discretion"
• "removed from view by legal order"

Since any QSpace item that has existed at some time may have been cited, we will always supply a "marker" when the item is requested, which will include the original metadata (for verification) plus one of the previously-listed withdrawal statements in place of the link to the object. The metadata should be visible, but not searchable. These items will also be made unavailable for metadata harvesting.

Deletion

If the intent is to remove all records and links to an item from the collection, for legal reasons, etc., the item can be expunged upon request.