The Knowledge Bank, a project of Ohio State’s libraries and the top technology office, gives OSU researchers an easy way to publish and preserve their work on the Web. But it’s not just a place for scholarly research. Video clips, full-length books and even FBI reports call this digital space home.
The Knowledge Bank is an endeavor of OSU Libraries and the Office of the Chief Information Officer which began in 2004 and has more than 42,000 materials on the site.
Tschera Connell, a member of the library’s scholarly resources integration unit, heads the project. She said the main goal is to store OSU’s “intellectual content” on a digital platform. This includes journal articles, senior honors theses and archives material.
The digital content is collected into various communities, based on a common topic or source.
Storage on the site makes documents more accessible in many ways.
First is the digital aspect. Larry Allen, spokesman for OSU Libraries, said the bank accepts all kinds of materials and finds ways to preserve them “so that 20 years from now it’s not saved in a format that’s not accessible, like 8-track tapes,” he said.
The Ohio Journal of Science, a print journal, has a presence on Knowledge Bank mostly to make back issues — which date back to 1900 — easier to find and use for those doing research.
Materials on the site are indexed by Google and are given priority ranking on Google Scholar searches because they come from an institutional repository, Connell said.
Other journals, such as the Empirical Musicology Review are Web-based, but the articles are archived on the Knowledge Bank site.
Most of the material comes from those who have content they would like to share, Connell said. But she said the Bank sometimes does seek out certain things.
“We always start with ‘who has the rights to the materials,'” Connell said. “That is sort of the flow in all cases.”
If submitters are uncertain if they own the rights, Connell said the Knowledge Bank will work with them to find out.
“We try to provide a set of services for people who have content,” she said. In addition to dealing with copyrights, they also set up the individual and community pages and provide hardware and software updates.
The material is kept under a creative commons license which allows those who own the content to customize the copyright. The library has the right to distribute the material online through the Knowledge Bank.
While the primary goal of the Knowledge Bank is to preserve scholarship and to provide worldwide access, there are also a number of interesting sights and sounds that appeal to more than just the academic.
The alphabetical list of communities spans from the Academy of Teaching to WOSU. The latter contains an episode of “Physics on the Edge,” an educational science show for middle and high school students.
Some of the most interesting documents are the nearly 1,500 pages of FBI reports on the Black Panther Party, a radical black power movement, from the 1960s and ‘70s. The reports were the result of the COINTEL (Counter-Intelligence) program, which investigated, often illegally, dissident groups.
An anonymous donor requested the information through a federal Freedom of Information Act request and gave them to OSU’s libraries.
Everyday people telling their stories is the theme of the Digital Storytelling community.
Through OSU Digital Storytelling, members of the academic community are invited to create short multimedia projects, often personal and emotional, about their work in the university.
One video made by a graduate art education student showcased a Short North mural created in the fall of the 2008 presidential election. The mural, featuring a silhouette of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama overlooking a field of outstretched hands, was worked on mostly by young members of the Weinland Park community.
“It’s a very different way to talk about academic work,” Diaz said. “And we think that’s useful because it allows you to engage people who might not otherwise understand your work or what you’re talking about.”
