The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important the sharing of information and research results is to help address a worldwide health crisis. It has also disrupted many plans for in-person scholarly conferences and meetings.
The Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA) is available to support the Rice community during this time. The RDSA provides global access to research and scholarship produced at Rice University. It has long served as the online home for Rice theses and dissertations, faculty, staff, and student work, and historical documents and images. The archive is now also available for new uses, such as:
- COVID-19 research and/or data
- For those who have had to cancel events or shift to virtual meetings and conferences, the RDSA can serve as a place presenters can share conference papers and other presentation materials.
Benefits of using the RDSA include:
- Visibility: When you deposit your work in the RDSA, it becomes available to search engines as part of a worldwide network of research collections–your peers worldwide will be able to find it quickly. Items can also be assigned DOIs, which further helps with citation and discovery.
- Stability: Each item deposited in the RDSA gets a permanent, citable, linkable URL that will not change or break over time.
- Longevity: The RDSA provides long-term storage for your materials by managing backups, and ensuring that your work remains accessible at a stable location on the Web and available to search engines. RDSA will help keep works in common file formats up to date, ensuring that as technology and formats evolve, your work will remain accessible and usable.
If you would like to learn more, please contact Fondren’s Digital Scholarship Services at cds@rice.edu.