Institutional Repositories for Public Engagement: Creating a Common Good Model for an Engaged Campus

Abstract

Most higher-education institutions strive to be publicly engaged and community centered. These institutions leverage faculty, researchers, librarians, community liaisons, and communication specialists to meet this mission, but they have largely underutilized the potential of institutional repositories. Academic institutions can use institutional repositories to provide open access and long-term preservation to institutional gray literature, research data, university publications, and campus research products that have tangible, real-world applications for the communities they serve. Using examples from the University of Minnesota, this article demonstrates how making this content discoverable, openly accessible, and preserved for the future through an institutional repository not only increases the value of this publicly-engaged work but also creates a lasting record of a university’s public engagement efforts and contributes to the mission of the institution.