Frequently Asked Questions
Who can add content to the repositories?
Any University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) faculty member or researcher is eligible to add content to the repository. Content must fall within the scope of the repository, and the collection where it is being added. Learn more about submitting to the repositories.
What is a repository Community?
A repository Community is an administrative unit at UHM that produces research, has a defined leader, has long-term stability, and can assume responsibility for setting Community policies. Each Community can contain one or more Collections. Learn more about the repository structure.
Departments, Labs, Centers and other UHM units can establish Communities according to the UHM Community & Collection Policies and Guidelines. Each Community must be able to assign a coordinator who can work with our staff.
What kind of content can I add?
Our repositories accept all manner of content in a variety of digital formats. Some examples are:
- Documents, such as articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers
- Books
- Theses and dissertations
- Data sets
- Computer programs
- Visualizations, simulations, and other models
- Multimedia publications
- Bibliographic datasets
- Images
- Audio files
- Video files
- Learning objects
- Web pages
How does the repository preserve digital material?
The repository identifies two levels of digital preservation: bit preservation, and functional preservation. Bit preservation ensures that a file remains exactly the same over time. Functional preservation ensures that the material continues to be immediately usable in the same way it was originally even as digital formats and physical media evolve. Some files can be functionally preserved using straightforward format migration (e.g., TIFF images or XML documents). Other file formats are proprietary, or for other reasons are much harder to preserve functionally.
At UHM, we acknowledge the fact we cannot predict or control the formats in which faculty and researchers create their research materials. Faculty use the tools that are best for their purposes, resulting in materials of a variety of file formats. Because of this we’ve defined three levels of preservation for a given format: supported, known, or unsupported.
- Supported formats will be functionally preserved using either format migration or emulation techniques.
- Known formats will be functionally preserved if possible. These are formats that we can’t promise to preserve (e.g., proprietary or binary formats) but which are so popular that we believe third party migration tools will emerge to help with format migration.
- Unsupported formats will not be functionally preserved. These are formats that we don’t know enough about to do any sort of functional preservation.
All three levels will be bit preserved so that “digital archaeologists” of the future will have the raw material to work with if the material proves to be worth that effort.
