About the Mines Repository

About the Mines Repository

The repository recently moved from Mountain Scholar to repository.mines.edu.

What is the Mines Repository?

Introduction

This is a digital archive that preserves and distributes research from many Colorado School of Mines faculty and students.

Repository structure

The Mines Repository is organized into a hierarchical structure of communities, sub-communities and collections, intended to correspond to an organizational hierarchy. Communities represent the top layer, which could reflect top-level departments, schools, or research centers. Sub communities are a further division of the community. Collections are groups of related documents. It's essentially a simple file system that allows for as many layers as required.

Each community, sub-community and collection has its own home page which can be customised with an individual logo and other information.

Do you need to register?

This depends on what you would like to do. In most cases, you can browse and search items without having to be logged in. If you want to submit an item or sign up for collection email alerts you will need to register.

Searching

There are two principal ways of finding content within this repository: searching and browsing.

Use the search bar on top of each page to search through the repository. After submitting your search, you will be led to the so called 'Discovery' page. Here you can find your search results and refine your search query if necessary.

Optionally, you can refine your search query on the Discovery page by using the "Filters" section. To expand this section, click the "Show Advanced Filters" link. Here you can specify what metadata field should contain or equal a specific value.

By clicking the cog wheel on the top right corner of the search results, you can specify the way the results should be ordered.

You will find that there is an additional search box on each community, sub-community and collection home page. This search box will allow you to carry out a simple search at that level of hierarchy or any level below it using a drop down menu.

Here are a few tips on searching:

The site search box

Search terms entered in the site search box will be searched against all indexed metadata fields ; as well as the full text for PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and RTF files.

What is not searched - stop words

The search engine ignores certain words that occur frequently in English, but do not add value to the search. These are: "a", "and", "are", "as", "at", "be", "but", "by", "for", "if", "in", "into", "is","it","no", "not", "of", "on", "or", "such", "the", "to", "was".

Truncation

Use an asterisk (*) after a word stem to get all hits having words starting with that root, for example:

comput*

will retrieve compute, computer, computers, computing, computational, etc.

Stemming

The search engine automatically expands words with common endings to include plurals, past tenses ...etc.

Phrase searching

To search using multiple words as a phrase, put quotation marks (") around the phrase, for example:

"New Mexico"

"global warming"

Boolean searching

The following Boolean operators can be used to combine terms. Note that they must be CAPITALIZED 

Use AND to limit searches to find items containing all words or phrases combined with this operator, e.g.

   computer AND modeling

will retrieve all items that contain BOTH the words "computer" and "modeling".

Use OR to enlarge searches to find items containing any of the words or phrases surrounding this operator

   "global warming" OR "climate change"

will retrieve all items that contain EITHER of the phrases "global warming" or "climate change".

Eliminate items with unwanted words

Put a minus (-) sign before a word if it should not appear in the search results. Alternatively, you can use NOT. This can limit your search to eliminate unwanted hits. For instance, in the search:

   rock -roll or rock NOT roll

you will get items containing the word "rock", except those that also contain the word "roll".

This will retrieve all items that contain the word "rock" EXCEPT those also containing the word "roll". Be careful when using this feature because you could exclude items that you may be interested in that happen to mention the second word in a different context.

Combine different types of boolean searches

Parentheses can be used in the search query to group search terms into sets, and operators can then be applied to the whole set, e.g.

   (education OR learning OR teaching) AND (child* OR teen* OR youth OR adolescent) 

Browsing

Browse by 'Communities & Collections'

This link will display the repository's full community and collection hierarchy.

Other 'Browse by' menu links

Below the 'Communities & Collections' browse link, multiple other browse categories can be found. Each of those browse links will bring you to a page with a list of possible values for this field. You can switch between browse lists, and choose different ordering and display options or jump to a specific location within the list.

Browse within communities and collections

Each community and collection has additional browse options within it. Browsing a community will also browse any sub-communities or collections within it.

Submitting content

How can you submit a new item?

First, make sure you are logged in. Please take a look at our Submission Guide. Use the 'Submissions' links from the navigation bar or the 'Submit a new item to this collection' from this collection. Please see the Submission Policies page for more information.

Please follow the steps: add descriptive metadata, upload the file, check the submission and agree to the distribution license. There is an additional option to automatically populate some of the metadata using Crossref (if you have a DOI) or PubMed.

Will my submission appear immediately?

The Mines Repository has a review workflow where an administrator will check your submission before it enters the archive. If the item is accepted, he or she will deposit the item to the appropriate collection.

An item's metadata is available for searching immediately, the full text will be indexed over-night and will be available to be searched the following morning.

Please let us know if you have any questions at repository@mines.edu.

Joseph Kraus (jkraus@mines.edu) is the primary contact for the repository.