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University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

IDEALS

This guide has information on how to deposit and access IDEALS materials for individuals and collection administrators.

Notice on Recent Migration to New Platform

IDEALS was migrated to a new system on June 23, 2022. All content should be retained and all permanent URLs should still work. We continue to resolve issues identified with the new platform and work on improving the user experience of the system. Please send any feedback to ideals@library.illinois.edu.

Welcome!

IDEALS is the institutional repository for research and scholarship - including published and unpublished works, theses and dissertations, video and audio - produced at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In rare circumstances IDEALS can also accept research datasets, but the Illinois Data Bank is now the preferred service for publishing research data. All faculty, staff, and graduate students can deposit into IDEALS. This wiki is a place to find information related to IDEALS, including policies, procedures, guidelines, and help pages.

What is IDEALS?

IDEALS is an institutional repository that collects, disseminates, and provides persistent and reliable access to the research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Faculty, staff, graduate students, and in some cases undergraduate students, can deposit their research and scholarship directly into IDEALS. Departments can use IDEALS to distribute their working papers, technical reports, or other research material. Contact us at ideals@library.illinois.edu for more information.

IDEALS Mission

The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS) is a set of collections and related services that together constitute the campus institutional repository. IDEALS aims to complement traditional scholarly publishing. The IDEALS service preserves and provides persistent and reliable access to the digital works of faculty, staff, and students to give them the greatest possible recognition. IDEALS centralizes the twin goals of access and preservation, as do other institutional repositories, to provide the maximal campus commitment toward achieving these ends.

IDEALS is a service offered through the University Library and Technology Services under sponsorship of the Office of the Provost.

Technology Platform

The current IDEALS platform is a locally developed system. Until June 2022, IDEALS ran on DSpace (version 5.x), an open source digital repository software developed jointly by the MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company.