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The Lafayette Digital Repository (LDR) is both an institutional repository and an access portal to Lafayette College Library’s Digital Collections. In accordance with the departmental mission of Digital Scholarship Services of Digital Scholarship Services, the LDR supports the activities of the College’s faculty, researchers, students, and community partners by preserving, curating, and disseminating digital resources. The LDR enacts the Libraries’ ongoing Libraries’ ongoing mission of providing information resources and services to help Lafayette faculty and students attain their goals as teachers, scholars, and learners, through the creation and maintenance of accessible digital collections, scholarly output, and other digital materials that have enduring value for intellectual inquiry and documentation of College activities.

A Note About Content

The Lafayette Digital Repository (LDR) makes unique and historical materials accessible for study and research. These materials represent the context in which they were created and the perspectives of their creators, and may contain depictions of racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and other challenging or offensive attitudes and actions. The materials do not reflect the values of Lafayette College or the Digital Scholarship Services department. By providing access to these records in our digital collections, we acknowledge the role that digital archives play in learning from the past.

Item metadata in the LDR re-uses language provided by creators on or within the resources themselves, in accordance with best practices for archival description. We strive to place outdated or offensive terminology in context through curation and critical descriptive information. We also welcome feedback from users so that we can learn and adjust our practices. Please contact us at repository@lafayette.edu if you encounter problematic language or would like to give feedback about descriptive information accompanying an item or collection in the LDR.

Faculty Scholarship and the LDR

The Lafayette College faculty passed an open access resolution in April, 2011. Faculty are encouraged to share their research outputs via inclusion in the Lafayette Digital Repository. Flexible access and visibility controls are available for deposited content.

Why submit your content to the LDR?

Members of the faculty and administrative departments may use the LDR submission form to deposit articles to the Lafayette Digital Repository. For other content types, such as presentations, research data, audiovisual materials, etc. please contact Nora Zimmerman, Digital Repository Librarian, at zimmerno@lafayette.edu for more information.

Policies

Please consult the Special Collections Copyright, Reproduction & Use Policies for information about using and sharing content from Lafayette College Archives & Special Collections that is made available in the LDR. If you have further questions about these materials, please contact archives@lafayette.edu.

Preservation Support Policy

The Lafayette Digital Repository is committed to providing sustainable and trustworthy long-term access to content according to international best practices for digital preservation.

All resources in the LDR are assigned unique persistent identifiers by the repository system, as well as persistent URLs through the Handle.net registry. Bit-level preservation of digital objects and metadata is managed through the generation of checksum hashes and performance of fixity checking at regular intervals.

Beyond these initial preservation activities, the LDR team is developing a broader preservation policy and action plan. Details about new services and preservation planning will be announced as they are approved by Library and College stakeholders.