UND Scholarly Commons: 2 Years of Keeping It 💯

Thanks to Zeineb Yousif, Digital Initiatives Librarian, for this guest post about our two-year-old institutional repository!

At the end of September 2019, UND’s institutional repository, the UND Scholarly Commons, surpassed 100,000 downloads. We founded the repository in September 2017, and over the course of the past two years, use of the Commons has exceeded all expectations. Stephanie Walker, Dean of Libraries & Information Resources, noted that she’d “thought that by the time we were through our first 3-year contract, it would be good if we could get at least 5,000 items deposited. Within 2 short years, we had over 18,000 items in the repository, far outstripping the next largest client Digital Commons had, which had only 6,000 items…We look forward to sharing even more as we grow.”

Works included on the Commons have been downloaded in 189 countries, with our highest number of users located in the United States, the UK, Russia, Canada, and India. Notable organizations downloading work from the Commons include the Department of Veteran Affairs, Purdue University, and the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. Our graduate work has been particularly well received as our most popular publications are our Theses and Dissertations collection, Physical Therapy Scholarly Projects, and Occupational Therapy Capstones.

Other high impact collections include UND Datasets, Open Educational Resources, and the UND Website Archive.

For more information on the repository, please reach out to Zeineb Yousif, Digital Initiatives Librarian.