Alumna Dana Nixon published her thesis on relationship experiences of Latino/a-White couples in St. Cloud State University’s institutional repository in December 2015 when she was finishing her master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy.
Her thesis has since been downloaded more than 40,000 times and was the most downloaded thesis on The Repository @ St. Cloud State. The Repository is one of the largest investments St. Cloud State University has made to open access resources. Since its launch in 2011, it has seen more than 1.8 million downloads from across the world.
The Repository highlights the work of teacher-scholars and students at the university across all disciplines.
Since 2011, almost 40 thousand institutions have downloaded material from the repository in 231 countries, said University Archivist Tom Steman.
“I am amazed every single month at how many downloads there are and where these downloads are coming from,” he said. “Obviously the majority are from the United States, but I mean it’s all over the world. The impact is all over the world.”
Much of what has been published in the Repository so far is student theses and dissertations. But it offers a range of possibilities for the types of content such as grant reports, white papers, historical materials or creative works.
Faculty and students can put white papers, posters, videos and more on the Repository. Faculty are starting journals on the Repository, and it has the capability to host symposiums and conferences.
The Repository also houses University history with Steman entering digitized materials including commencement programs, catalogs and yearbooks from the university’s more than 150 years of history.
It highlights in one place the scholarship of students and employees. While raising the visibility of St. Cloud State, Steman said.
“We have a lot of untapped opportunity there for people to get their work out there and be visible or find a partnership with someone,” she said. “A researcher at another institution could find their article and ask to work on a research project together. A graduate student researching if they want to go into the field could find a professor’s work and want to study with them. It’s really a resource for our teacher-scholars.”
