What is New in ValpoScholar?

By Jon Bull, Associate Professor of Library Science

What is ValpoScholar?

Since 2011 ValpoScholar has been Valpo’s institutional repository, hosted by the Christopher Center Library. In short, the platform tries to collect the university’s intellectual output in one place. That output includes University Archives, student work, faculty work, original journals and textbooks. ValpoScholar is like an electronic press, but without all of the paygates. In total, there are over 11,000 records in the repository that have been downloaded over 6.7 million times with more than 809,000 downloads in the past year alone. You can access the repository here: ValpoScholar

Exactly what type of content is on the website?

There is a lot in ValpoScholar – from one-time projects to some ongoing projects that have been building for years. Faculty can use ValpoScholar to store materials from special projects such as their in-progress research with students, journals, or student conference proceedings.

Here are a few examples:

Evidence-Based Project Reports – These final projects are the culmination of our DNP students in the College of Nursing and Health Professions. Since the program’s founding, nearly all of the 200 project reports are available in full-text and being accessed by nurses and other health professionals around the world. For the full collection, please visit: https://scholar.valpo.edu/ebpr/

Valparaiso Scholarship and Creative Work reception – The annual celebration of Faculty and Staff refereed work collects citations from the past calendar year and lists them in ValpoScholar, giving the university community an idea of our scholarly output for the year. While it is nearly impossible to capture the entire scholarly record of the university, these lists offer up an opportunity to celebrate colleagues as they share their finalized work with the larger world. For the full collection, please visit: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vscw/.  These publications are also listed by college and department. For example, you can click here to see what articles from Geology/Meteorology are currently being viewed all over the world: https://scholar.valpo.edu/geomet/

Journals – The Journal of Values-Based Leadership, Midwest Social Sciences Journal, The Great Lakes Entomologist, The Journal of Tolkien Research, The Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences, and the Valparaiso Fiction Review are all active journals with recently published issues in ValpoScholar. Most of these are blind, peer-reviewed journals with world-wide audiences, impact factors, and are all open access. To view a whole list of journals, including active and inactive journals, please visit: https://scholar.valpo.edu/peer_review_list.html

SOURCE – Students are required to publish their abstracts and have the option to publish the final project from the annual celebration of scholarship. Since ValpoScholar started archiving SOURCE in 2011, there have been more than 1,200 student projects documented. This introduction to professional presentation and public documentation of that presentation has helped students establish ownership of their ideas ahead of any eventual publication. For the full collection, please visit: https://scholar.valpo.edu/cus/.

University History – ValpoScholar also hosts historical content from the university, including hosting an archive for our catalogs, going all the way back to 1859 as well as many other ongoing projects that keep VU history alive and well. For the full collection, please visit: https://scholar.valpo.edu/archives/

Does anyone even look at ValpoScholar content?

Absolutely! As mentioned above, ValpoScholar has had over 6.7 million downloads from nearly every country in the world. Only about 39% of ValpoScholar’s traffic is from the USA with users from India, United Kingdom, The Philippines, Canada, China, and Australia being the most active. Faculty and students have had their posters, conference materials, and articles posted in ValpoScholar cited in others’ work.

What has been going on with ValpoScholar lately?

In addition to the many ongoing projects listed above, initial work has begun to digitize and publish a collection focusing on the 100th celebration of VU becoming a Lutheran institution. In partnership with Calling and Spiritual Life, this project offers some interesting opportunities to celebrate and revitalize VU’s Lutheran heritage on-and-off campus. There is a lot of Lutheran material that the library hasn’t had a chance to share with the digital world yet.

How do I get something posted into ValpoScholar?
Just email scholar@valpo.edu with your inquiry and the library will take it from there.