We are very pleased to celebrate the outstanding work of Becky Thoms, Head of Digital Initiatives at Utah State University (USU), as one of our 2018 IR All-Stars. The material showcased in USU’s IR, DigitalCommons@USU, is incredibly diverse and directly reflects the library’s ability to serve their institution’s wide-ranging needs. Becky leads a wonderful team at USU Libraries (including Dylan Burns and Becca Nelson) with a large vision for the breadth and depth of services that the library can provide to the entire campus. Her team does incredible outreach work across campus as part of Becky’s goal to make the IR central to USU academic life.
Becky has presented on and written about several areas of expertise in her contributions to the scholarly communications arena including data management, open educational resources, copyright, and institutional repositories (check out her SelectedWorks site to read more). In their 2016 bepress webinar, Becky and her colleague Betty Rozum discuss how they’ve built mutually beneficial relationships with campus partners to provide exemplary data support services to USU faculty. They also reveal how their resulting collaborations have supported larger institutional goals, such as the specialized needs of researchers publishing datasets on Fern Genomes. In her copious spare time, Becky also collaborates with the USU Press, a refereed scholarly publishing arm of USU Libraries whose publications have garnered over 500,000 downloads.
Under Becky’s leadership, the IR has been utilized to support student and faculty work, data, OERs and more through over a dozen journals, over 500 series, over a dozen conferences, several ETD series, image galleries, and book galleries. In order to accomplish this, Becky has helped to build a very strong relationship with the Office of Research, and currently the repository supports 27 Research Centers on campus including the Center for Water-Efficient Landscaping and the Differential Geometry software project. The IR showcases varied student work including a student research symposium, the honors program, ETDs, and a “Getaway Special Program” of student experiments into research about space. Student work alone has had 4 ½ million downloads so far!
We congratulate Becky and wish her continued success!