Undergraduate students will submit their theses and capstones into one location. Graduate students will submit their theses and dissertations into one location. Both of these locations are under the School of Graduate, Professional, and Continuing Education (SGCPE) within the Institutional Repository's hierarchy. While they are both under the same heading, the submission portals lead to different locations, so please ensure that you are submitting to the correct portal. Undergraduates will submit to the "Undergraduate Student Theses and Capstones" portal (identified inside the gray box in the screenshot); graduate students will submit to the "Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations" portal (identified with black in the screenshot). Both of these are labelled in the screenshot below. To access these portals, first click on the small "+" (plus) icon next to the "School of Graduate, Professional, and Continuing Education (SGPCE)" text (labelled with a red "1" in the screenshot. The example already has the subgroups dropped down, so it appears as a "-" (minus) instead). Click into the appropriate portal according to your student group, and from here, the submission process is nearly identical.
From here, you can access the link to submit your research. Check the lefthand side of the screen to locate the large "Submit Your Research" button. 
These first four fields are all required fields and must be completed. Luckily, these are all very basic metadata fields that ask for the title of your project, your name, the date you will complete your degree (it is okay to put a future date if you still have some time to completion), and the type of document. Each group of student will have their own choices for submission; both will have the "Thesis" label, but graduate students will also have "Dissertation" and undergraduate students will have "Capstone."
Example of Graduate choices
While only the first four fields are required in the system, we require and ask that students fill out as much metadata as necessary. Some that should be filled out to better identify your project are:
Digital Commons at Lewis University requires that students fill out the abstract, the keywords, and the Creative Commons License field.
An abstract is a short, few sentence summary (usually about a paragraph) of the key arguments and findings of a paper. It assists in optimizing for searching on the Internet and gives potential readers a quick look into what your work is all about! For examples of what these look like across different disciplines, check out this guide by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We expect one, but do not stress too much about making this a perfect summary of the work. Put some thought into it and how you would want the project to be represented, but keep in mind that you cannot capture every nuance of the work in this paragraph.
Keywords are short phrases or words that allow indexing within search engines and systems, allowing for quick, easy discoverability. When people search these keywords, your paper is among the papers that come up in the search results. These typically should be words that convey the main topic of your paper and/or the subfield that your paper is working within. For example, if you a History student writing about an event in a specific country, you can include that country, the historical theory/methodology you are using, the timeframe, and the subfield of history as potential keywords. You also want more specific keywords, which can be directly pulled from your abstract! If Irish Americans were a subject in your research (and you mentioned them in the abstract), that can serve as one of your keywords. For further information and examples, check out this guide from Iowa State University. It makes the important point that, if you were to publish your work in a journal in the future, that you may need to follow the guidelines of that journal for your keywords.
Creative Commons is explained in our LibGuide. We also require you to fill out this field, although by default, Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative (BY-NC-ND) is selected, which is the most restrictive license. This license means that people are free to use and share your work freely but only in its original form (they cannot modify it at all) and for non-commercial purposes. However, we strongly encourage authors to choose less restrictive licenses.
For the "Subject Categories" field, please select the subfield/subdiscipline that your work belongs to! This helps with classifying the work and places it into the Digital Commons Network. The administrator of the Institutional Repository may not know which subfield your work belongs to; if a subfield is not selected, the administrator will select only the top level for your field (e.g. Psychology instead of Clinical Psychology, even if your work is a clinical psychology work).
Your last step is to finally submit the work! To do so, you can upload your file under the "Upload Full Text" section. You can choose from your computer, a remote site (i.e. OneDrive or Google Drive) or to a file that is hosted on another website. For most cases, you will directly upload your file.
There is also the option to upload additional files below. If you check the box, after you click the "Submit" button, you will be brought to a new page that allows you to upload your additional files. These can include things like data that you used but is not fully represented in your main paper, extra charts/graphs, spreadsheets, or anything that was directly used or connected to your paper that you did not upload as part of your main submission.
Congratulations on reaching this point, for finishing your work, and for utilizing our Digital Commons platform!