Rice Research Repository: Finding and using repository content

R-3 organizational structure

R-3 is organized as a series of top-level collections called communities. Communities may contain both sub-communities and collections. 

Many Rice departments, centers, and institutes have communities and/or collections. One way to find material is to first look for a community associated with a department, center, etc. and click through to see what sub-communities or collections it contains.

Browsing R-3

Clicking on a community or collection will allow you to browse its content.

Searching R-3

Adapted from Atmire's DSpace Quick Guide

IMPORTANT: You can no longer search for content within a collection (i.e., there is no search bar within each collection). From a collection/community, you can search using the magnifying glass at the top of the page, but will then need to limit the search to a specific collection (requires that you know the name of the collection you would like to search).

Use the site search box on the homepage or click on the magnifying glass at the top of the page to search the repository. After submitting your search, you will be directed to a discovery page that will allow you to see results and refine the query if needed. To refine your query, use the filters and settings on the left hand side of the page.

By default, the search function will first search all of R-3. To limit the search to a specific community or collection, use the drop down menu in the discovery page search box.

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

To improve your search, here are a few tips:

• The search engine ignores words that occur frequently in English but do not add value to the search, such as "a," "and," "are," "to," "was."
• The search engine automatically expands words with common endings to include plurals, past tenses, etc.
• Truncation: Use an asterisk (*) after a word stem to get all hits having words starting with that root.
  • For example: nano* will retrieve nanoscale, nanophotonics, nanotubes, etc.
• Phrase searching: To search multiple words as a phrase, put quotation marks(") around the phrase.
  • For example: "institutional repository"
• 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 before the word that should not appear.
  • For example: Searching repository -institutional or repository NOT institutional will return all items containing "repository" except for those that also contain the word "institutional."
• Boolean searching: The following Boolean operators can be used to combine search terms. Please note that they must be CAPITALIZED.
  • "AND" will retrieve items that contain all words included. For example cats AND dogs will retrieve items that contain both words.
  • "OR" will expand a search to include items containing any of the words or phrases surrounding the operator. For example, cats OR dogs will retrieve all items that contain either word.
  • "NOT" will exclude items containing will exclude items containing the word following the operator. For example training NOT cat will retrieve all items that contain the word "training" EXCEPT those also containing the word "cat."
  • Parentheses can be used in a search query to group search terms into sets; operators can then be applied to the whole set. For example: (cats OR dogs) AND (training OR discipline)

After conducting an initial search, you can further refine your search using the filters on the left side of the page.

Subscribing to a collection or community

If you would like to receive email notifications when new items are added to a collection or community, click on the bell icon to the right of the collection/community name. Note: You can only use this feature if you are logged into R-3.

Most R-3 content has a "Citation" field included in the metadata. Repository content can also be ingested into a citation manager (such as Zotero) to generate a citation in your desired bibliographic style.

Always cite the DOI or handle (often labeled "Citable link to this page" e.g., https://hdl.handle.net/1911/18199) included on the record page. Do not cite the URL that appears in the browser address bar because it is not a persistent URL (e.g., https://repository.rice.edu/items/a85ca362-0553-4bb8-927e-cf0f1eb0a3a9)

Copyright and reuse

Works in R-3 are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. The copyright for any work included in R-3 is retained by the copyright owner. The repository or Rice University does not own copyrights.

Works are made available in R-3 at the direction of contributors (an author/creator, department, center, program, or school at Rice or its affiliates) according to their understanding of their rights in that material. Works are added to R-3 when contributors affirm that they own the rights or have authority to contribute the works. Rice University makes no representation or warranty about the appropriateness of the contribution or whether the contributor continues to own rights in the works.

Users of R-3 are responsible for determining whether a work is protected by copyright, the identity of the copyright owner, and the means for appropriately using the work. Additional information about copyright can be found on the library's website. Many of the works found in R-3 are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Information about Creative Commons licenses can also be found on the library website.

Users do not need to contact Rice University for permission solely because the work is available in R-3. When Rice University is not the rights owner, it will neither grant nor deny copyright permission regarding such materials. If a user determines that Rice University may be the copyright owner of a work and needs to contact the copyright owner, please start by contacting the person or office at Rice that was responsible for creating the work.

Embargoes

R-3 content may have been deposited under an embargo. When an item is embargoed, the metadata (e.g., author, title, abstract) is visible but the file is not publicly available.  The date for the embargo lift can be found in the full item record metadata in the field "dc.embargo.lift." Library staff are not authorized to provide a copy of this work during the embargo period.