Welcome to the University of Zimbabwe Institutional Repository!

POLICIES Community & Collection Policies

This repository will be a partnership between UZ Library, UZ Academic community and UZ administration. Content consists of collections produced by UZ communities, which are managed, preserved and distributed by UZ Libraries through DSpace. As in all partnerships, it is important that all stakeholders understand and agree to the policies, guidelines and procedures required to build an institutional repository. The following draft policy statements have been developed with input from the Institutional Repository Work Group.

What is a Community?

A "community" is typically an administrative unit at UZ that produces research, has a defined
leader, has long-term stability, and can assume responsibility for setting community policies.
Each community must be able to assign a coordinator who can work with DSpace staff. Groups
wishing to establish a community that does not fall into this definition will be considered on a
case-by-case basis. Individuals may not submit items without belonging to an established
community in DSpace.

What responsibilities does a Community take on?

A Community agrees to:

• arrange for submission and description of content
• make decisions about community and collection definitions
• notify DSpace administration of organizational changes affecting submissions
• understand and observe University policies relevant to DSpace, and educate community submitters regarding these policies
• clear copyright for items submitted when copyright owner is other than author(s) or submitters
• decide upon a submission workflow for each collection

What rights does a Community retain?

A Community retains the right to:

• decide policy regarding content to be submitted (within Content Guidelines)
• decide who may submit content within the community
• limit access to content at the item level either to UZ only or to specific individuals or groups
• receive a copy of submitted content upon request
• remove items and collections (as outlined in "Withdrawal Policy".)
• approve addition of or elimination of sub-communities
• decide on content for customization of community and collection home pages

What are UZ Libray’s responsibilities?

UZ Library agrees to:

• retain and maintain content submitted to DSpace
• distribute content according to community decisions
• apply accepted preservation techniques to content
• provide access to DSpace research, where required
• notify communities of significant changes to content, e.g. format migration
• if UZ Library ceases to support DSpace, return collections to existing communities and transfer to UZ Archives collections of communities that have ceased to exist
  

What are UZ Library’s rights?

UZ Library retains the right to:

• amend metadata for items in the repository
• refuse or de-accession items or Collections under certain circumstances – as outlined in "Withdrawal Policy"
• renegotiate terms of original agreement with Communities
• perform appraisal for long-term archiving when Communities cease to exist or within thirty years of the creation of a Collection
• move collections to reflect current understanding between DSpace and Communities
• migrate items if format is in danger of obsolescence
• set quotas (size of files, number of items)

What are UZ's responsibilities?

• set policy at the institute level regarding issues that affect Dspace, e.g. copyright rules, thesis requirements, etc..
• support functions mandated by existing policies
  

Format Support

Our policy for file format is:

• everything put in Dspace will be retrievable.
• we will recognize as many files’ formats as possible.
• we will support as many known file formats as possible.

Withdrawal of items from the repository

The Library foresees times when it may be necessary to remove items from the repository.
It has been decided that under some circumstances items will be removed from view, but to
avoid loss of the historical record, all such transactions will be traced in the form of a note in the <Description.provenance> field of the Dublin Core record. The content of the note should be
one of the following:

• "removed from view at request of the author"
• "removed from view at the University of Zimbabwe’s discretion"
• "removed from view at the UZ library’s discretion"
• "removed from view by legal order"

Since any item in the repository that has existed at some time may have been cited, we
will always supply a "tombstone" when the item is requested, which will include the original
metadata (for verification) plus one of the above withdrawal statements in place of the link
to the object. The metadata should be visible, but not searchable. These items will also be
made unavailable for metadata harvesting.