Technical Services

The Sherman Centre can assist researchers and students with a variety of projects. Please note that all of the services below–including journal publishing–are free of charge.

If you would like to access our services, please contact us as at scds@mcmaster.ca, for more information.

Scholarly Repository

The Sherman Centre offers support for MacSphere, McMaster’s institutional repository (IR). The purpose of the IR is to bring together all of the university’s research under one umbrella, with an aim to preserve and provide access to that research. McMaster researchers can archive their intellectual property in MacSphere, conveniently meeting the new Tri-Council mandate regarding open access.

Journal Publishing

Based on the Open Journal Systems software developed by the Public Knowledge Project, the Sherman Centre supports journal publishing via the McMaster University Library Press imprint. Beyond offering a feature-rich software platform, we offer critical journal support services such as DOI minting and registration.

Technical Infrastructure

The Sherman Centre maintains multiple physical servers in the McMaster University Library data centre. As such, we can provision virtual machines and storage for research projects. Please note that we do not host websites or offer routine IT services, but if you need server resources for learning or research purposes, we may well be able to assist.

Storage Consultation

Many researchers and research groups have fundamental questions about best practice for storage, backup, and archiving critical research files and data. As with project consultation, we are able to offer consulting services around these issues, helping people sort out the various threads and practice better file management without investing significant funds. A closely related service of the McMaster University Library is the Research Data Management service hosted around the corner from the Sherman Centre in the Library’s Maps, Data, GIS department. Often, both groups meet with researchers to help address both in-project and dissemination/sharing issues.

Advanced Workstations

We have three HP Z840 workstations with 10-core Xeon processors, 64GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD as the primary OS and application drive. They also have Nvidia Quadro K2200 GPUs currently driving twin 4K displays. These machines can handle pretty much every computing task thrown at them, and can render even the largest, highest resolution images with ease. We’ve loaded up the machines with a wide range of software, both proprietary and open source, to fill many digital scholarship needs. If something isn’t on the machines and is available for no or low cost, we will likely add it for you upon request.

3D Printers

The Sherman Centre has three 3D printers–an Ultimaker 2, a Makerbot 5th gen, and a Lulzbot TAZ 4–that are available to researchers interested in engaging more deeply in modelling and fabrication. Please contact us if you are interested in working with our printers.