The Scholars Repository hosted by Fort Hays State University’s Forsyth Library recently surpassed one million downloads.

According to the school, the repository hosted on the Digital Commons platform, made its public debut in January 2016. Forsyth Library launched the repository as a permanent, open access, digital showcase of the FHSU community’s creative, scholarly, and research productivity. The repository is primarily open access and is designed to make FHSU scholarship easy to find, share, cite, and use.

Professor of Philosophy Dr. Douglas Drabkin’s monograph The Intelligent Troglodyte’s Guide to Plato’s Republic and the FHSU-hosted, peer-reviewed Journal of International & Interdisciplinary Business Research were the first deposits made to the repository. The top download of all time is Four Leadership Theories Addressing Contemporary Leadership Issues as the Theories Relate to the Scholarship, Practice, and Leadership Model, an article within the FHSU-published peer-reviewed journal Academic Leadership: The Online Journal. Associate Professor of Management Dr. Robert Lloyd’s Open Educational Resource, The Four Functions of Management, remains the top downloaded FHSU faculty submission.

“As a library, Forsyth is committed to the principle of equal access to information. The repository is open to all users no matter where they are geographically,” said Jennifer Sauer, coordinator of scholar services and electronic resources & discovery services librarian. “It is continually growing and features new materials, formats, and mediums to ensure that users can make use of these collections to further their own exploration of knowledge.”

According to Sauer, the role of the FHSU Scholars Repository platform in presenting the university community’s scholarship and creative works, as well as select special collections and archives, increases visibility and discoverability, both for the authors/creators and the works themselves. The open access feature of the platform increases the impact of FHSU research and scholarship globally. 

The Digital Commons platform also integrates metrics, including citations, media mentions, tweets, and more. These metrics are gathered and reported to all levels of the repository, from platform administrators to journal editors and authors.

The repository is also home to a growing collection of historical documents about the university and surrounding region through the Archives Online, which features the University Archives Photographs Collection, George F. Sternberg Digital Collections, and the Reveille Yearbooks, to name a few.  

To learn more about the repository, visit https://scholars.fhsu.edu/.