InVisible Culture Indexing Project
University of Rochester’s Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies founded InVisible Culture in 1998, and is completely run by graduate students. An early instance of an online-only, peer-reviewed, academic journal, it was a pioneer at that time, but in more recent years it had not kept up with newer ways in which academic repositories and publishers index digital scholarship.
Recognizing that this was significantly decreasing our impact, I took on the project of correcting this for the journal. The Mellon Fellowship allowed me to tackle this long-term project in a way that would have otherwise been impossible.
-
Platforms such as Google Scholar or EBSCO rarely manually add journals’ articles to their repositories. Instead, they use software that automatically pulls data when new items are published. This was the fundamental issue with InVisible Culture’s lack of indexing.
-
DOIs are the standard method for ensuring that academic indexing databases can read a publication’s metadata. UR did not already have a DOI, therefore I had to advocate on behalf of IVC and other university researchers for the acquisition of one, which I am happy to say did happen.
-
IVC needed to be hosted on a platform that could meet the requirements for indexing and for DOIs. It has been a monumental task to identify a platform that would best suit our workflow, acquire funding to pay for the platform, and then lead a team of graduates and undergraduates to migrate our archive to the new platform. This process is projected to be completed by the end of summer 2022.
