5. Value – Library
perspective
•Open Access goal
•Source of content
•Solves space problem
•Examples of
undergraduate work
6. Value –
University/College
perspective
•Collection of student work
•Evidence of quality of
student research
•Recruiting tool
•Development
7. Value – Student
perspective
•Persistent URL
•Permanence
•University research venture
and community of scholars
•Examples of student work
•Student engagement
8. Value – Faculty
perspective
•All the above, plus:
•Demonstrates faculty instruction,
mentoring and assistance
•Helps to satisfy educational
outreach/public information
components of research grants
9. ScholarsArchive@OSU Undergraduate Research and
Theses Community:
http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/handle/1957/7
“Making the [undergraduate] work available online
raises the level of importance of the work for the
student. It's not just a hoop to be jumped through or a
box to be checked, but work that becomes accessible
to anyone with access to the internet. I've been
amazed how often the UHC theses get accessed and
downloaded. The value to OSU is in disseminating the
work of our students.“—Dan Arp
Editor's Notes
I’m going to spend the next 10 minutes or so describing our university’s experience with undergraduate theses, how we got started, challenges we encountered, lessons learned, and the value we see in making these resources available open access. I’m not going to automatically assume that you all know what I mean when I say open access. Open access refers to unrestricted online access to articles, books, book chapters, theses, research data and any other form of creative work or scholarship. That is, it is freely available online to anyone in the world with an internet connection and a web browser. Often, and almost always in the case of undergraduate student theses, the work is made available in open access digital repositories, also known as institutional repositories.
The OSU Libraries implemented our open access institutional repository in 2005. The goal for our IR from the start was not only to make the university’s scholarship more widely accessible and preserved but to meet needs of campus. We were very opportunistic in doing that. If someone expressed a desire to make use of the repository, we generally took them up on it. This served to demonstrate the utility of the repository as quickly as possible and it enabled us to start populating it with content that we knew someone would deem useful. When we were considering content that was appropriate for the IR we recalled that the Honors College had long wanted to make the physical copies of their student theses available in the library. During our initial meetings with the folks from Honors, you could see how much pride there was in the work of their students and their desire to make it available. The library had been unable or unwilling to devote the resources necessary to cataloging and shelving the physical copies, but making them available in the IR we felt would be relatively straightforward and cheap, and it was. Soon after, we identified two additional programs at OSU that require a final thesis of their graduating students—International Studies and Bioresource Research—and each of those programs were interested as well.
I was asked to talk about challenges and lessons learned. Honestly, the only thing I could think of that was worth mentioning is: take the necessary time to fully train the staff who are to be responsible for depositing items on student’s behalf. Develop adequate documentation. What seems self-evident to us in the library is not always evident to others, especially as it relates to metadata entry. I’d suggest that you develop whatever workflow works best for the particular community. I would have preferred that students submit items themselves, which is what we require of our graduate students. This provides the students with some familiarity with the process. In many cases, these students are future graduate students and even faculty who we hope will be depositing future theses, dissertations and articles to repositories in the future. Also, the students as authors we think are best able to apply appropriate keywords that describe the content. After we’d been live for awhile and had some content we did a major redesign of the repository website. On the original we had a link directly to the Honors College theses that was removed in favor of a rotating list. At this point we were making content available from a large number of communities on campus. The Honors College noticed immediately and expressed their disappointment. They said they referred to the home page in communications with their donors and incoming and prospective students. They talked us into retaining a link to the Undergraduate Research and Theses community on the front page. It was nice feedback to hear how important the digital collection was to them.
In thinking about the value proposition for making undergraduate research available in the IR, I think it is worthwhile to consider it from different points of view. In preparation for this panel presentation I surveyed a number of our partners across campus to get their perspective on this, and I’ll be interspersing their remarks in the next few slides.First and foremost, from a library’s perspective, making undergraduate research more widely available meets library’s goal, and the university’s goal, of disseminating the university’s scholarship to the citizens of the state and the world.As I mentioned earlier, the library was interested in being responsive to problems brought to our attention relating to the organization of, and access to, scholarship of the university. This is not relevant here at Claremont where you have a well established IR, but we were also just bringing our IR online at that time and looking at how to get content in, in order to learn how to use it, develop workflows, figure out permissions, etc. In general, we just wanted to start getting content into the IR to see how it worked, how well it was harvested and indexed by google, and how often the content was viewed and downloaded. Making the theses available online in the IR saves the space of storing physical copies while dramatically increasing access to them. One of the key members of our original IR task force was the university archivist who was a strong proponent of making undergraduate research available in the IR. His perspective was that archives historically had very little representation of the work of undergraduate students over the course of the university’s history. Making the research available in SA preserves it for future generations who are interested in the undergraduate research conducted at the institution.
From the University’s perspective, and the perspective of individual colleges, making the research available online provides the individual colleges with well-preserved, indexed and searchable collections of their students work.It providesevidence of the quality of undergraduate research conducted at OSU. Making the research available online establishes high expectations. When students know that their work is going to be freely available and well vetted, they do better work. It illustrates the extent to which undergraduates at OSU engage in real research and knowledge-producing activities. Students become part of the campus culture of creating and disseminating knowledge.Serves as a recruiting tool for prospective, high-achieving students and as a development tool.One of the university’s development focuses is on the exceptional student. Making this cohort’s research available more widely supports that goal.
Making the research available in SA provides the student with a persistent URL that can be reliably used in perpetuity. Students provide links to the research or creative work in their resumes, vitas and electronic portfolios to be shared with potential employers and graduate schools. We are working with our registrars office to become the first university to make the links available in electronic student transcripts as well.I think it gives students a sense of permanence about their work. Making theses available to a broader public helps the undergraduate researchers feel part of a larger research venture and a community of scholars. Gives students an understanding of what it means to share scientific knowledge. A respondent noted that this is deeply motivating and rewarding for these students. Several of our students have been able to publish their work in journals, extension pamphlets, and as educational outreach materials or have used the work as a building block for future research. Open access availability, in addition to encouraging quality work, encourages the free sharing of scientific knowledge.The availability of the research serves as evidence of the quality of undergraduate research at OSU and serves as a recruiting tool for prospective, high-achieving students.Helps students to have examples of previous student work. Encourages other undergraduates to follow in their footsteps and to do their best work.Research is a high impact experience that can make a difference to an undergraduate's life and career. The more we can celebrate and disseminate that, the more students will hopefully get involved and the more they will have a good experience at OSU and a good recollection of their experience.
Everything that is valued by the students and university should also be valued by the student’s teachers and faculty, right. In addition, I’d like to add that the student’s work demonstrates faculty instruction,assistance and participation in undergraduate research and mentoring. We add advisors and committee members as metadata elements and we hope to enable faculty to be able to search this easily so they can point to it in their vitas and for P&T. It also helps to satisfy 'educational outreach/public information' components for various research grants.
Before leaving you, I’d like to also mention that the OSU undergraduate research and theses community, in addition to theses also includes two collections of undergraduate research papers that have received university or library awards and the library is working with the university undergraduate research council to create an undergraduate research journal using the OJS open access journal publishing software.I’m going to conclude with a quote from Dan Arp the Dean of the University Honors Collegeat OSU and a big supporter of open access: “Making the [undergraduate] work available online raises the level of importance of the work for the student. It's not just a hoop to be jumped through or a box to be checked, but work that becomes accessible to anyone with access to the internet. I've been amazed how often the UHC theses get accessed and downloaded. The value to OSU is in disseminating the work of our students.—Dan Arp
