Chapman University Digital Commons, our open access repository for the scholarship, archives, and creative activity of our university, is celebrating its fifth anniversary! Launched on August 13, 2014, it has grown exponentially each year and showcases the brilliant output of our faculty, staff, and students on a global scale.

In the past five years, the over 25,000 works featured in Chapman University Digital Commons have been downloaded nearly three-quarters of a million times, by users from over 220 countries and territories around the world.

Objects and Downloads in Chapman University Digital Commons Over Time

The wide array of content in Chapman University Digital Commons includes faculty publications, data sets, audiovisual works, conference posters and presentations; graduate dissertations and theses; and a growing body of undergraduate work, including student journals, outstanding papers, Student Scholar Symposium posters, and music and dance performances. Also highlighted are a large number of textual and photographic materials from the Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections & Archives, containing information about Chapman’s history, a growing selection from the extensive Center for American War Letters and Henri Temianka archives, and other important archival collections housed here at Chapman University.

Works in Chapman University Digital Commons are not only indexed in the Digital Commons Network (a central access point for the nearly 600 Digital Commons repositories around the world), but in Google Scholar, PubMed, and Discover, the library’s central search tool. Works in the Chapman University Digital Commons have also been highlighted on far-reaching websites such as Scientific American, Salon, Psychology Today, and Wikipedia.

Chapman University Digital Commons Readership Map

What’s next?

As Chapman University Digital Commons continues to evolve, housing and highlighting faculty works to make them openly available to readers from around the world, increase citations, and bolster Chapman University’s reputation and reach will remain a core mission and driver of its growth. We plan to increase our support for data services, offering researchers a stable home for their data sets that will help them comply with funder mandates or satisfy publisher requirements for data sharing and accessibility. In addition, we’ll also increase our support for student works, whether they be theses and dissertations at the graduate level or showcases for outstanding undergraduate work.

How can I get involved?

If you would like your own work to be included in Chapman University Digital Commons, or you have an idea for a collection that should be created, then contact the Coordinator for Scholarly Communications & Electronic Resources, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker, at laughtin@chapman.edu. You may also visit the Chapman University Digital Commons website to read frequently asked questions, submission policies, or just browse the vast and unique materials available there.

The success of the Chapman University Digital Commons is a result of the participation of the entire Chapman University community, and the library is looking forward to collaborating with everyone to continue to build and promote this valuable resource for years to come.