Institutional repositories can play a key role in a college or university’s mission to serve the greater community. At the College at Brockport (SUNY), Kim Myers views the repository as an ideal venue for supporting and sharing regional, community-oriented scholarship. SUNY Brockport has long been a center for Great Lakes research, but for years this valuable research was housed primarily on one professor’s computer. Working with Professor Joseph Makarewicz, Kim has created an IR collection to archive and disseminate these research articles, government documents, community newsletters, and technical reports.
At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian Marilyn Billings works with university administration, research centers, and departments across campus to make the IR the showcase for the university’s community-engaged scholarly work. Encompassing thousands of theses and dissertations, oral histories, outreach programs, journals, newsletters, and policy papers, the IR’s Community-Engagement collections also provide a central location for documenting the university’s eligibility for the Carnegie Elective Classification in Community Engagement. In this webinar, Kim and Marilyn will share their distinct experiences and motivations for mounting regional, community-oriented IR collections, the role of the IR collections in gaining grants and supporting continued research, and the benefits that open-access to such scholarship brings to the local community.
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