2-26-08

Media Release

OSU Libraries’ Digital Archive Ranked Seventh Nationally

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon State University’s innovative digital archive, ScholarsArchive@OSU, has been ranked seventh among all digital repositories housed at American universities – and 29th in the world.

The ranking was conducted by Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. The Cybermetrics Lab conducts quantitative analysis of the Internet and in particular to the scholarly communication of scientific knowledge via the World Wide Web.

ScholarsArchive@OSU is the university’s digital service for gathering, representing and recording the work of the research and teaching community. Its primary goal is to provide long-term access to the historic and contemporary intellectual work that makes OSU faculty and students leaders in research, teaching, and creativity.

It also includes materials from outside the institution in support of OSU’s land, sun, sea and space grant missions and other research interests. ScholarsArchive@OSU was started just three years ago, making its high ranking among 200 higher learning institutions around the world that much more impressive.

Michael Boock, head of technical services for OSU Libraries, said ScholarsArchive@OSU provides digital preservation and access to a large body of scholarly materials that include faculty journal articles as well as research that previously was not cataloged or was largely unknown, including OSU series, technical reports, working papers, conference papers, theses and dissertations.

“This is research that you wouldn’t find using Academic Search Premier or even more specialized databases,” Boock said. “And, before the libraries made it available in ScholarsArchive@OSU, you wouldn’t find it in Google and other internet search engines either. Now, because everything in ScholarsArchive@OSU is freely available online to the world, anyone can access these materials.”

The site also serves as an invaluable tool for finding obscure references or papers that may not otherwise be available in a print format, helpilng OSU research to make an even bigger impact.

“Before I came to OSU, I worked at a reference desk a few hours a week,” Boock said. “The questions that always stumped me were those from faculty and graduate students who had a citation to an obscure un-cataloged and un-indexed paper on some arcane topic. If the author could be reached, she or he was always flattered to find that someone was interested. However, we were often unable to locate a copy of the title or if we did find it, it was on a disk in a file format that was now obsolete.”

Boock said the types of materials found in ScholarsArchive@OSU are diverse. Some examples include:

• A report deposited by the Land Institute on Measure 37, which has been downloaded more than 400 times;

• An older thesis on habitat use and densities of cavity-nesting birds in the Oregon coast;

• A title that was being used by a researcher at Weyerhaeuser – and in high demand at the Guin Library at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center – is now available digitally and being used and cited around the world.

"This ranking affirms the importance of this work to the libraries and represents the hard work of many of those involved in making ScholarsArchive@OSU a reality,” Boock said. “I encourage academic units and individual faculty and staff that are interested in ensuring long-term and increased access to their research, to contact me about depositing their scholarly materials.”

For information, go to http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/dspace/index.jsp.