The Institutional Repository Launch Event (feat. guest author Jason Smith)
On Wednesday, April 30, during our campus-wide Community Hour at noon, the Lewis University Library officially unveiled a project long in the works: an institutional repository to preserve and promote the scholarly work, publications, and performances from the Lewis University community. The launch event featured speeches from Andrew Lenaghan, the Director of the Library, and Jason Smith, Scholarly Communications Instruction Librarian, who serves as the primary administrator of the Institutional Repository with support from the Institutional Repository Steering Committee. Those present during the event learned the history of the initiative (dating back almost ten years), the work performed within the library to implement the system, the structure of the platform, the submission process, and learned how the work submitted to the platform is part of a large network of scholars. Work can be from students, staff, faculty, or anybody officially affiliated or contracted with Lewis University as long as the work was produced during their tenure at Lewis University.
Work submitted to Digital Commons at Lewis University (the official name of our platform) enters into the Digital Commons Network. This network is a collection of every institution that subscribes to the Digital Commons platform; this means that the work we produce here at Lewis appears next to the work from every other institution in the network. It allows our work to be part of large academic conversations and contribute to the collective knowledge that scholars are producing. Some of these institutions include our fellow Lasallian academic institutions. For everybody who submits, this also means that they have a collection of their work in one location. For students, this can help in showcasing all of your work for graduate school admissions, internships, or jobs!
Importantly, since the platform runs on an Open Access model, works hosted on the platform are accessible free of charge to anybody from anywhere. Not only does this assist with allowing the brilliant research produced at Lewis to be part of a massive network of other Open Access materials/institutions as mentioned, it is essential to promoting and achieving our Lasallian mission.
By implementing an open access Institutional Repository, we are eliminating as many financial, economic, and accessibility-related barriers to accessing knowledge, information, and cutting-edge research. Our students can learn from the faculty producing work here and from every other researcher on the Digital Commons network. Other students, the general public, prospective students—anybody—are all learning from our materials and the work of our community. Through our Institutional Repository, we are promoting a lifelong pursuit of knowledge and forming communities of scholarship, both internally and externally from the University.
Our repository can be found here. The Library will be hosting tutorial and informational sessions in the next academic year. These sessions will delve into more specific use cases, dive deeper into the submission process, and highlight new initiatives within the repository. As Digital Commons at Lewis University is for the community, it is important to the Steering Committee that we implemented a way for community members to provide feedback. To provide any suggestions or comments on new ways to address community needs or to suggest topics for an informational session, please fill out our survey. This survey will always be active, and the results go directly to the committee members. For further questions about the Institutional Repository, please reach out to Jason at jsmith58@lewisu.edu.
Thank you for those in physical attendance at our Institutional Repository Launch event. Important people to know, Andrew Lenaghan (Director) wears the grey suit on the right side. Jason Smith (Scholarly Communications Instruction Librarian) wears the black suit at the lectern. Alice Creason (Technical Services Librarian) stands wearing the bright blue dress. And, Kelley Plass (Research & Instruction Librarian) sits to the left of Alice, in purple.
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