This page is intended to help you make decisions about how to design your community and its collections and to help you communicate those decisions to Knowledge Bank staff. It is intended for two groups of users: those who are in the process of starting a new community; and those who have already established a community they would like to modify. If you have not yet met with Knowledge Bank staff, you should do so before continuing. Email the KB Help listserv at libkbhelp@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu. If you have an established community and simply want to request changes to it, you can skip to the form for sending those requests.
If you are setting up a new community, please take a moment to read the overview below. It will help you better understand what information the setup form is asking for and the decisions you are being asked to make. It describes the basic concepts behind the Knowledge Bank's organization and the options available to you for customizing your own community, as well as providing links to examples of a range of ways others have set up their communities.
The basic design of the Knowledge Bank and similar repositories centers around Communities, Sub-Communities, and Collections. One way users will navigate to the individual items you submit to the Knowledge Bank primarily by navigating through lists of Communities, Sub-Communities and Collections. Thus it is crucial that you name and organize your Community and its sub-divisions in ways that will make immediate sense to those users.
As a starting point, it might help to think of the Community like a large filing cabinet. Its contents are organized in two main ways. First, individual Items are assigned to Collections, much like individual pages, articles, etc., are usually put in manila folders, rather than put in drawers loose-leaf. Second, you can optionally organize your Community in terms of Sub-Communities, much like each drawer of a filing cabinet can be assigned a particular topic, but does not have to be.
Of course, unlike a filing cabinet, a Knowledge Bank community is almost endlessly flexible. Follow this link to see some diagrams of ways you might organize your Community.
Communities are the first level of organization within the Knowledge Bank. Communities are most often correlated with academic departments, centers, or other institutional entities, but any OSU-affiliated group with a shared research interest or individual who has knowledge in a digital format that they wish to store, preserve, and distribute can establish a Knowledge Bank Community.
The first step is to choose a name for your Community. You probably have an idea of what name you want to use, but before you make that decision final, you might want to browse through the list of existing Knowledge Bank Communities.
Knowledge Bank users will interact with your Community primarily by visiting its homepage. You can customize the content of that homepage in a number of ways. You can include a brief description of your Community, customize the Copyright statement, and provide a list of links or other text to display in the righthand column of the page.
A Sub-Community represents an individual or sub-group within a Community who will contribute items to the Knowledge Bank. How you define Sub-Communities -- or whether you define them at all -- will depend on how you defined your Community. Thus, Sub-Communities might be departments within a college, areas within a department, or individuals within an area of specialization.
The Knowledge Bank allows you a great deal of flexibility in creating Sub-Communities. Your Community can contain as many Sub-Communities as you want, and each of those Sub-Communities can contain multiple Sub-Communities. The distinctions you make can be as fine-grained as you care to make them.
Your options for customizing the Sub-Community homepages are the same as for the Community homepage.
The smallest unit of organization in the Knowledge Bank is the individual Item. These may consist of single pages, documents, recordings, or other digital files. To make them easier for users to find and use, Items must always be contained within at least one Collection. (Collections, in turn, must be associated with at least one Community or Sub-Community.)
Basically, a Collection is a set of Items defined by the similarities among those items. You might define a collection based on genre (articles, lab reports), media (sound recordings, videos), events (conference documents, lecture series), or other characteristics of your Communities items.
Collections can be defined with a great deal of flexibility. On the one hand, Collections can be associated with multiple Communities and/or Sub-Communities, so that the materials in your community do not need to mirror its organizational structure. And on the other hand, Items can be associated with more than one collection, so you can designate overlapping collections and provide users with more than one way to navigate to a particular item.
Communities, Sub-Communities, and Collections define the basic structure that will be used to organize the Items you add to the Knowledge Bank. However, you still need to establish regular procedures for adding those Items. For example, you will need to identify an "Administrator," or contact person for the Community who will interact with Knowledge Bank staff. This "Administrator" identifies additions and changes to the Community and provides information about teach Item (metadata) when it is added to the Knowledge Bank.
Given the wide range of ways these workflows might be configured, we ask that you meet with Knowledge Bank staff to plan this part of your project. Specifically, please e-mail Tschera Connell at connell.17@osu.edu