Illinois State University students and faculty know they can come to Milner Library to find sources for their research, but fewer know that Milner librarians are creating scholarship of their own. A good portion of this scholarship can be found, for free, through ISU ReD. In fact, late last year, the 100th publication written by Milner staff and faculty was submitted to the repository. Here are some highlights from those hundred items.
The Hundredth Submission
What was the item that crossed the ‘hundred item’ milestone? It was an article titled, “Applying Library of Congress Demographic Group Characteristics for Creators for Creators,” written by Cataloging Librarians Eric Willey and Angela Yon. The article discusses Willey and Yon’s work creating richer, more descriptive catalog records to aid the search process. In addition to this article, Willey has submitted 19 other publications to ISU ReD. Yon has two other submissions.
The First Submission
ISU ReD’s first submission was an article written by Scholarly Communication and Music Librarian Anne Shelley. Shelley’s article was a review she had written of the Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis Archive and was posted on the repository site in October 2012. Shelley has 24 additional items available in the repository.
The Collection is Varied
It is probably expected that content written by Milner faculty would be all about libraries, and a good portion of the collection does focus on Library Science, Archives, and Preservation. However, Milner librarians have also written about so much more. Milner librarians write about all kinds of things, like history, music, and even exercise science. The type of content varies as well. Submissions include conference presentations, scholarly and non-scholarly articles, digitized posters, book chapters, and book reviews.
Milner’s Collection Reaches Back Pretty Far
Milner’s earliest faculty title, “Cracks in the Black Dike: Secrecy, the Media, and the F-117A,” was published in 1991 by retired librarian Jim Cunningham. The article was added retroactively in 2013, as ISU ReD was created just the year before. However, it is still an example of the history collected within the digital walls. Library faculty continue to regularly submit work to the collection. The latest submission was in December 2019.
Content has Spread across the World
Milner librarians have also used ISU ReD to share their work a shockingly wide audience. Submissions in this collection have been downloaded more than 100,000 times, from over 5,000 institutions in 185 countries. One single item, a book chapter, has even been downloaded over 38,000 alone, more than any other article submitted to ISU ReD from any collection!
If you would like more information about the collections available in ISU ReD or want to submit your own work to the repository, please contact Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team at isured@ilstu.edu.
