Digital Commons: showcasing undergraduate research Bepress was started by UC Berkeley faculty in 1999 who wanted to explore electronic publishing in an attempt to improve scholarly publishing. We publish over 60 journals today. In 2002 we started a project with CDL to use that publishing platform to store UC publications and publish unique journals. That project resulted in Digital Commons, which is used by over 140 institutions today. Digital Commons is used by these universities, colleges, societies & associations, government agencies to store and showcase an incredible range of materials. These materials range from scholarly peer-reviewed post-print articles to faculty presentations, student theses & dissertations, senior papers to images, videos and anything else that the institution considers of intellectual value. Digital Commons is increasingly the institutional memory of these customers. Digital Commons is a hosted platform. Bepress provides and manages the hardware and software infrastructure needed to support our customers. Bepress has an excellent and proactive client services organization that works closely with each customer on the design, implementation and launch of their Digital Commons. Content within Digital Commons is well-organized, is showcase nicely for the users, and can be readily managed by librarians. Digital Commons is optimized for the major search engines like Google and Google Scholar so content is findable and usually is ranked high in Google search results. 1

Publishing UPenn: CUREJ Colby: Atlas of Maine Huge growth in publishing student research: from undergrad research papers to doctoral students’ dissertations. Utah State’s IMW Journal is entirely student run with an academic review board consisting exclusively of scholars in the field. The staff consists of USU students; Two students act as editors in chief, one as managing editor, and six serve as associate editors. Though student editors participate in screening submissions, membership in the academic review board is limited to professional scholars. The Univ of Pennsylvania’s CUREJ (“courage”) is a growing collection of peer-reviewed undergraduate papers written in collaboration with a faculty mentor. It was an annual print publication for multiple years but in 2005 the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences came to the library and mentioned that he had this "great publication, with outstanding undergrad research, but it's PRINT".  The Library was able to respond with "well let's try online publishing with Digital Commons" - historically 3rd or 4th of the "Top 10 Most Downloaded" items from all of Penn's DC come from CUREJ. - CUREJ was such a success that about 6 months later the Wharton School came to the library and asked to do the same thing for its students UPenn: CUREJ Colby: Atlas of Maine Utah State: Intermountain West Journal Illinois Wesleyan: college journals 2

Events Publishing: conferences & workshops Illinois Wesleyan: John Wesley Powell Conference Edith Cowan: teaching & learning conference Events Publishing takes advantage of the publishing platform built within Digital Commons. Events Publishing is intended to support and manage content for conferences, workshops and similar types of meetings. What makes Events Publishing exciting is that the library can work with conference and workshop organizers to organize the conference papers or presentation by the actual conference sessions. The module can also manage future workshops and conferences. This can include a call for papers, workflows for submissions of papers or presentations, review by the conference organizers and selection of papers, and finally collect the papers after the event. A side benefit of managing these submissions within the repository is that copyright permissions can be dealt with up-front during the submission process, making it far easier for the organizers and librarians to manage and make accessible those conference proceedings. he ECULTURE conference provides staff and students of Edith Cowan University with the opportunity to showcase innovation in the field of learning and teaching. ECULTURE encourages scholarship in teaching, the demonstration of best practice and to facilitate the exchange of ideas. The focus of ECULTURE is on unpublished research and case studies in the field of learning and teaching. 3

Scholarship Cal Poly: Senior papers Butler University: senior papers Macalester: Honors projects University of Nebraska: student scholarship At Cal Poly, the University President really understood the potential of their Digital Commons when he saw DC’s ability to showcase senior students’ final research project. As he stated: this is where prospective students and parents could see what the university expects of them during their 4 years at Cal Poly. 4

Collections Bryant College: student scholarship and historical material Colby College: Environment Studies project University of Wollongong: Image collection Georgetown Law School: prize winning student papers UMass: Community engagement projects University of Georgia Law School: commencement address Bryant: Undergrad course catalog Stuff about and for students: Increasingly, Digital Commons is being used as the institutional memory for students. In addition to showcasing students’ scholarship, libraries are Bryant College: A librarian and a student were going through boxes of archived materials when they came upon letters written during WW2 from servicemen who had been students at Bryant. These materials are gradually being digitized into Digital Commons. Students are beginning to write papers about these materials, and the library is publishing those papers beside the letters. See letters from John Renza. 5

Digital Commons: showcasing undergraduate research We think there is value for showcasing student scholarship: Authority: it’s a signal of quality for students’ works to be showcased in the repository. Service: Someone (the library) is sharing the work of publishing with faculty, making sure that it looks good and providing the resources to help sustain the publication Discoverability: publications can be found (and found again) Place: these works are gathered together and can be browsed. What some schools are starting to note is that students’ works, when they know it will go into the repository and be available to the world, tends to be of higher quality. 6