UVicSpace Guidelines

1. Collection guidelines
2. Community guidelines
3. Access guidelines, terms of use, and withdrawal guidelines
4. Format support, privacy, and disclaimer

The following guidelines outline various aspects of depositing and managing content in UVicSpace. These guidelines are subject to internal review and modification.

UVicSpace includes the following types of documents

• Theses and dissertations;
• Research reports and technical reports;
• Previously published scholarly and creative works including journal articles, books, chapters of books, monographs, popular media articles, images, videos and podcasts, papers, lectures, speeches, and course-related materials produced by UVic instructors;
• Data sets (spreadsheets) and code (software) where they are part of a thesis, research report, or published work and where the data has been deemed to be of academic or archival value;
• University lectures (e.g., Lansdowne and Provost's Diversity Lectures, Distinguished Women Scholars Lectures, and other public lectures).
• UVic Convocation and other archival materials.
• Other material not expressly stated here, upon approval by UVicSpace administrator.

Criteria for depositing material

• Content must be produced, submitted, or sponsored by UVic faculty, students, staff or affiliated partners.
• Content must be scholarly, educational, or research oriented.
• Content must be ready for distribution.
• The author/creator must be able and willing to grant UVicSpace the right to preserve and distribute the work, including fulfilling publisher conditions for depositing works and clearing copyright permissions when appropriate.

The following guidelines outline various aspects of UVicSpace community collections.

Responsibilities of community leads

• Make decisions about collection definitions.
• Name a coordinator who can work with UVicSpace staff.
• Confirm or obtain copyright permission for items submitted.
• Inform UVicSpace staff if any item need to be removed (as outlined in the Withdrawal Policy).

UVicSpace staff responsibilities

UVicSpace staff agree to:

• Retain and maintain content submitted to UVicSpace.
• Distribute content according to community decisions and in accordance with the Access Policy.
• Preserve content using accepted preservation techniques.
• Notify communities of significant changes to content, e.g., format migration, software upgrades, etc.
• Maintain appropriate technology infrastructure and security.
• Comply with university policy on issues which affect UVicSpace.
• Return collections to existing communities and transfer to UVic Archives the collections of communities that cease to exist according to UVic Archives policies and procedures, where appropriate.

UVic will

• Perform appraisal for long-term archiving when communities cease to exist.
• Migrate items if format is in danger of obsolescence.
• Set guidelines regarding issues that affect UVicSpace, such as copyright rules, thesis and dissertation requirements, etc.
• Support functions mandated by existing University policies.
• Understand and observe university policies relevant to UVicSpace, and educate community submitters regarding these policies.

Access guidelines

All items in UVicSpace will be freely accessible for all to view unless otherwise stated.

• An item can fall under an embargo in which access is blocked, preventing the ability to view the item.
• Theses and dissertations may be embargoed for one or more years before defaulting to open access.

Terms of use

• Material is to be used solely for the purpose of research and private study unless otherwise specified.
• It is the researcher's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in the collection.
• Any use of a copy allowed by fair dealing (i.e., research and private study) does not require the authorization of the copyright owner of the work in question.
• Researchers must make their own assessments of rights in light of their intended use.

Withdrawal guidelines

UVic Libraries foresee times when it may be necessary to withdraw items from UVicSpace. Under some circumstances items will be removed from view, but to avoid loss of the historical record, all such transactions will be traced in the form of a note in the < Description.provenance > field of the item's record. The content will note one of the following reasons:

• Removed from view at request of the author.
• Removed from view at UVic's discretion.
• Removed from view at UVic Libraries' discretion.
• Removed from view by legal order.
• Removed from view at the community's discretion.

Since items that are removed may have been cited, UVicSpace will always supply a "tombstone" when the item is removed, which will include the original meta data for verification plus one of the above withdrawal statements in place of the link to the object. The meta data will be visible, but not searchable, and is unavailable for meta data harvesting.

Archiving and preservation

We wish to provide support for as many file formats as possible. Over time, items stored in UVicSpace will be preserved as is, using a combination of time-honored techniques for data management and best practices for digital preservation. As for specific formats, however, the proprietary nature of many file types makes it impossible to guarantee preservation. Put simply, our policy for file formats is:

• Everything in UVicSpace will be retrievable.
• We will recognize as many file formats as possible.
• We will support as many known file formats as possible.

When a file is uploaded, we assign it one of the following categories:

• Supported: we fully support the format.
• Known: we can recognize the format, but cannot guarantee full support.
• Unsupported: we cannot recognize a format; these will be listed as "application/octet-stream," aka, Unknown.

By "support" we mean "make usable in the future, using whatever combination of techniques (such as migration, emulation, etc.) is appropriate given the context of need." For supported formats, we might choose to bulk-transform files from a current format version to a future one, for instance. Because we can't predict which services will be necessary in the future, we continually monitor formats and techniques to ensure we can accommodate needs as they arise.

In the meantime, we can choose to support a format if we can gather enough documentation to capture how the format works. In particular, we collect file specifications, descriptions and code samples and make those available in the UVicSpace Format Reference Collection below. Unfortunately, this means that proprietary formats with nonpublic materials cannot be supported in UVicSpace.

We will still preserve these files, however, and in cases where such formats are native to tools supported by UVicSpace, we will provide you with guidance on converting your files into formats we do support. It is also likely that the popularity of some proprietary formats (such as Microsoft .doc, .xls, and .ppt) will ensure their continued prevalence or at least the tools to convert such formats to new ones. Even so, we cannot guarantee this level of service, so we will still list these formats as "known," not "supported."
 

Supported file types

UVicSpace can accommodate any type of uploaded file. It auto-recognizes common formats including DOC, PDF, XLS, PPT, JPEG, MPEG, and TIFF.

Privacy

The University of Victoria collects, uses, discloses, and retains personal information pursuant to British Columbia's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

UVicSpace collects personal information from:

• Users involved in the submission content and metadata.
• Users who subscribe to the alerting service.

For further information, please contact UVicSpace staff.

Disclaimer

Although care has been taken in preparing the information contained in UVicSpace, the University of Victoria does not and cannot guarantee its accuracy. Anyone using the information on this site does so at their own risk; any loss arising from the use of information on this website is the sole responsibility of the user.

The University of Victoria will not be responsible for any injury or damage arising from its use. Use of UVicSpace is subject to the Terms & conditions for use of official University of Victoria websites.