In a coup for the University of Wollongong and their repository Research Online, the recently published archive of the avant garde arts and culture journal Oz Magazine was picked up by Dangerous Minds among other news outlets. Dubbed “the most controversial magazine of the 60s,” Oz Magazine is now housed in UOW’s repository. It has also featured recently in Open Culture, The Plaid Zebra, and The Guardian which detailed its turbulent history. Originally, Dangerous Minds got it from a blog called Exile on Moan Street, an example of how smaller bloggers’ Google searches can get picked up by larger news outlets, especially when the repository already employs powerful search engine optimization.
UOW Library Associate Director for Collections & Scholarly Communications, Rebecca Daly, reports: “It is quite amazing–we had 4,500 downloads in the 9 months prior, and 10,000+ downloads in just 2 weeks. The Dangerous Minds blog kicked it off, and now the Guardian article has continued the trend.”
It’s a great showcase of the magazine’s archive and what can be done with the book gallery structure in Digital Commons repositories. As a warning to readers, some of the content and images are explicit, reflecting attitudes of the era in which the material was originally published.
