University Libraries

By Maureen Schlangen

This week, Oct. 24-30, 2016, all around the world, people are celebrating a monumental human achievement: Anyone with access to the Internet can download breakthrough research, archival documents and images, special collections, data sets and other treasures untold from a veritable cornucopia of reputable open-access journals and institutional repositories including eCommons, all constructed with the noble purposes of advancing knowledge and ensuring that all have access to information in that pursuit—even when they don’t have subscriptions to research libraries and expensive scholarly journals.

It’s the biggest week of the year for institutional repository managers.

Yet I get to my office this morning and … NO CARD. Again. I didn’t get one for Ohio Institutional Repository Day Oct. 5, either, come to think of it.

But I don’t need a greeting card to know that eCommons is right up there with front porches, Rudy on the Run, intramurals and undergraduate research among the many great things going at the University of Dayton.

In the past decade, as open-access archiving and publishing have gained wider acceptance across the United States and around the world, institutional repositories have become a reliable and stable medium for sharing scholarly work and advancing research. Since eCommons launched three years ago this week, our research, documents, archival items and special collections have been downloaded almost 300,000 times from more than 10,000 institutions, corporations, organizations and government offices in more than 200 countries.

As of Friday, Oct. 21, 28 collections in eCommons had reached the 2,000-download milestone:

Collection - Number of Downloads

Flyer News - 50,805

Marian Studies - 28,410

News Releases - 19, 532

Catholic Sisters International - 15, 834

Stander Symposium Posters - 14,475

Commencement Programs - 13,908

Honors Theses - 11,583

The University of Dayton Magazine - 9,370

Marian Library Studies - 8,051

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications - 6,953

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy - 5,260

Guides to Archival and Special Collections - 5,144

University Yearbooks - 4,866

Religious Studies Faculty Publications - 4,208

Beauraing Apparitions Photograph Collection - 4,149

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing - 4,123

Counselor Education and Human Services Faculty Publications - 4,084

Senate Documents - 3,810

Roesch Library Faculty Publications - 3,177

Communication Faculty Publications - 3,091

Relics and Reliquaries Collection - 2,780

English Faculty Publications - 2,751

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications - 2,601

Biology Faculty Publications - 2,466

Holy Cards - 2,405

Computer Science Faculty Publications - 2,268

Physical Therapy Faculty Publications - 2,170

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications - 2,025

Feel free to browse! It’s all free.

Next, we’ll look at some of the most popular items in the repository.

—Maureen Schlangen, e-scholarship and communications manager