About Creative Matter

About SelectedWorks

Other Frequently Asked Questions


What is Creative Matter?

Creative Matter is the digital repository based on the principle of Open Access, which enables us to collect, distribute and preserve the scholarly output of the faculty, students, staff, and their collaborations at Skidmore College.

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Who can contribute to Creative Matter?

Individuals (including students, staff, and faculty members), departments, programs, centers or other units affiliated with Skidmore may contribute content to Creative Matter.

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What is the collection policy for Creative Matter?

Submitted content should fall within the following categories:

  • Published scholarship
  • Academic presentations and posters
  • Creative works and performances
  • Student academic projects and papers, including theses and capstone projects
  • Materials related to events sponsored by Skidmore College
  • Skidmore publications produced by faculty, students, and staff
  • Datasets produced by faculty, students, and staff

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Who oversees Creative Matter?

Decisions regarding the scope and mission of Creative Matter are made by Scribner Library librarians in consultation with Academic Affairs. Day-to-day operations are overseen by library personnel. For assistance, please contact David Seiler or your subject librarian.

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What are the benefits of contributing my work to Creative Matter?

Creative Matter increases the visibility of scholarly and creative work produced by Skidmore College faculty, staff and students by making it available in one central online location. Major benefits of depositing work in Creative Matter include:

  • Share your scholarly work to a broader range
  • Improve visibility in major search engine
  • Preserve and access to content through a permanent URL
  • Retain intellectual property rights to your work (e.g. publication, withdraw and etc.)
  • Track download statistics via comprehensive reports

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What is SelectedWorks?

SelectedWorks is a faculty profile system that harvests metadata from Skidmore's institutional repository, Creative Matter, to populate customizable faculty profile pages. SelectedWorks pages may include publications, datasets, awards, grants received, and any other information about yourself that you wish to share.

SelectedWorks pages can be used to promote other webpages you maintain, journals you are associated with, or organizations you support. It can also be used to share your scholarship and accomplishments with a built-in mailing list feature and view webpage traffic via a personalized reports page.

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What are the benefits of creating my SelectedWorks page?
  • Global discoverability of your academic profile and scholarly works (publications, presentations, datasets and etc.)
    • Collecting and organizing scholarly legacy in one central location
    • Promoting discoverability in search results (e.g. Google Scholar)
    • Personalized worldwide readership statistics
  • Ownership of your profile
    • Easy in-line editing and immediate updates
    • Co-managed account with the library
    • Permanent URL
  • Academic networking opportunities
    • Easy "follow" functionality
    • Compatible with other social media tools

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How can I set up my SelectedWorks page?

Any faculty or staff member can set up a SelectedWorks page for their research. Please contact SelectedWorks site administrator David Seiler or your subject librarian to discuss a plan and time line.

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How does SelectedWorks communicate with Creative Matter?

Creative Matter is Skidmore’s institutional repository, which archives and makes available the scholarly work of Skidmore faculty, staff and students by academic departments and programs. SelectedWorks is a Skidmore-branded platform that harvests metadata from Creative Matter and displays the information by individual scholar. This allows SelectedWorks to function as a faculty profile system and publish faculty’s academic profiles from more than 200 universities over the world. Think of Selected Works as a cross between the traditional faculty web page and a social media platform such as Academia.edu or Researchgate.net.

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Will student research projects involving human subjects need to secure Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval if they will be posted in Creative Matter?

IRB review is required for research projects that involve human subjects and meet the federal definition of research, which is defined as “a systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” Generalizable knowledge applies to research projects in which the researcher intends to draw conclusions that will contribute to general knowledge in the field or apply the findings to a larger population. Generalizable knowledge also occurs when the researcher intends to share the results with an audience outside the College, such as through journal articles, presentations at conferences, or an online repository such as Creative Matter. As a result, if a student’s thesis involves human subjects research, IRB approval must be secured before that work can be made openly available in Creative Matter.

Note: Access to some theses may be restricted if IRB approval was not obtained prior to data collection. For more information, see Skidmore IRB Home.

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I don't have electronic versions of old working papers that I'd like to include in the repository. Is it okay to scan the printed page to a PDF file?

Yes--scanning printed pages is a great way to create PDF files for inclusion in the repository. There are two ways to scan a page: using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or scanning the page as an image. Making OCR scans requires careful proofreading and loses the original formatting of the documents. Image scans cannot be searched. The best solution takes advantage of both of these methods. Many software applications allow for the OCR capture of image scans. When documents are scanned this way, users see the image scan but search the full-text of the document. This is the preferred method for scanning documents for the repository.

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When I copy and paste abstracts into the Submit form, some formatted text reverts to plain text. What's going on?

When copying abstracts from a word processing file or a PDF file, and pasting the text into the submission form, you are taking text from an environment that supports fonts and text style changes. Because the abstract is intended to be presented on the web, text styles must be specified using HTML codes.

If submitting an abstract in HTML format, please be sure to select the corresponding option on the submission form.

The following HTML tags are recognized by the system and may be used to format an abstract (use lowercase tags):

How to include HTML tags

HTML tags
<p> - paragraph
<p>This is the first paragraph.</p>
<p>This is the second paragraph.</p>

This is the first paragraph.

This is the second paragraph.
<br /> - line break
<p>This is a line of text with a linebreak here. <br /> This is text after</p>

This is a line of text with a linebreak here.
This is text after
<strong> - strong/bold
<strong>bold text</strong>

bold text
<em> - italics/emphasis
<em>italicized text</em>

italicized text
<sub> - subscript
Text with <sub>subscript</sub>

Text with subscript
<sup> - superscript
Text with <sup>superscript</sup>

Text with superscript

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How do I include accents and special characters in the abstracts and titles?

The repository software supports the worldwide character set (Unicode, utf-8). Accents, symbols, and other special characters may be copied and pasted into the abstract or title field from a word processing file or typed in directly. Windows users may also use the Character Map to insert these characters. Macintosh users may use the Character Palette (available via Edit > Special Characters in the Finder).

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How do I revise a submission?

To revise a submission that has been posted to the repository, contact the repository administrator with the new version.

If the submission has been submitted, but not yet posted, you may revise it via your My Account page:

  1. Locate the article on your My Account page, and click the title.
  2. Click Revise Submission from the list of options in the left sidebar.
  3. Enter your changes in the Revise Submission form, and click Submit at the bottom of the page to submit your changes. (You only need to modify the portion of the form that corresponds to the changes you wish to make.)

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How can I submit a multi-part file, such as multiple chapters for a book?

Combine all the sections together as one Microsoft Word file or PDF file and submit that.

To make one PDF file from multiple files, open the first PDF file, then choose Document>Insert Pages from Acrobat's menus to insert the second file (indicate it should go after the last page of the first file), and repeat for all documents. The result will be one compound PDF file which may then be submitted.

If you feel that the one large PDF file might be too large for some people to download, we suggest that you submit the consolidated file as the full text of the article, and then upload the separate chapters or sections of the document as Associated Files. These files will appear on the web page alongside the complete document. For more information about uploading associated files, see below.

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Can I post related files (sound clips, data sets, etc.) alongside the published article?

Yes. The bepress system refers to these supplementary items as Associated Files. You will be prompted to submit Associated Files when you upload your submissions. The name of the files you upload will appear on the web site along with your short description of it. Viewers must have the necessary software to open your files; that is not provided by the bepress system.

Please be sure that there are no permissions issues related to use of the associated material. Sometimes, especially with images, you must write a letter seeking permission to use the material before it can be posted.

Also note that where possible, items such as images, charts and tables that are referenced in the document (or otherwise an integral part of the document) should be included directly in the article itself and not posted just as associated files.

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Can I post a reprint from a journal?

It depends on what the journal allows, which is usually specified in their agreement with the author. If it would not violate copyright to post the reprint on your repository site, you're welcome to do so. Permissions for many publishers can be found at SHERPA RoMEO.

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A working paper in our repository site has been published in a slightly revised form in a journal. What should I do?

Many journals do not have any restrictions on working papers that preceded an article, especially if substantial revisions were made. You should check your author agreement with the journal to confirm that there is no problem with leaving the working paper on the site. The repository would constitute noncommercial use.

Assuming the working paper does remain on posted in the repository, it is a good idea to include the citation to the published article on the cover page of the repository working paper. Please contact the repository administrator to request this change.

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