Abstract
Institutional repositories (IRs) have evolved to showcase a wide-variety of authors and types of material. The early years of IR development focused on collecting and presenting faculty research, primarily in the form of research papers. Graduate theses and dissertations soon began to be incorporated into the scope of IR collection policies and have become as common in IRs as faculty research. Undergraduate research, however, appears to be much less common than faculty or graduate work. This paper examines the extent to which undergraduate student works (USW) are represented in the IRs of U.S. colleges and universities that use bepress’ Digital Commons product. Types and sizes of collections, span of coverage, prominence, and discoverability are considered. The authors hypothesize that USW are underrepresented in IRs and are not easily discoverable due to lack of available cataloging.
Publication Date
Summer 7-1-2019