Whitworth University has an institutional repository allowing student and faculty research available on worldwide scale.
“The institutional repository is a third party hosted site where we can collect all of the digital versions of research that students or faculty do,” library instructor Kathy Watts said. “It’s all in a web portal on the Whitworth page.”
Students now have access to see their professors’ work, and students also have an opportunity to include their own work in the database.
Students, depending on their program, can post their work and research on the program, making it discoverable. is is especially important if students want to go to graduate school.
Students can put on their resume that they have a paper published and uploaded on a database.
This provides students a permanent URL, where their work can be discovered by anybody, even potential employers, Watts said.
The librarians hope to get as much faculty work into the database as possible. The librarians are looking to upload student work from honors students in particular,library director Amanda Clark said.
Next year the librarians want to start focusing more on uploading student work.
“The best part about this is that anything we put in the web portal is discoverable on Google,” Clark said. “That is what is so exciting, because within the couple months since we started, hundreds of things have been downloaded because people can find them on Google.”
The database stores faculty papers including papers students might not have known existed such as lectures faculty presented at conferences.
The database also holds master’s theses and Whitworth archives such as the yearbooks and newspapers, Clark said.
Whitworth had no place to physically store projects, audio clips, lectures and videos, and they would end up being forgotten despite the work and research put into them, Watts said.
“It’s expanding what people can find out about Whitworth, about the research that goes on here at Whitworth, so suddenly we are broadcast all across the planet,” Clark said. “Everything in the database is branded for Whitworth, it’s a great promotion. A lot of what we were doing here just stayed here at Whitworth, and now we are able to distribute stuff much more broadly.”
Contact Sarah Haman at [email protected]
