UST Research Online is the the University of St. Thomas’ institutional repository. Initiated by the library staff, the goal is to include the creative and scholarly works of the faculty, students and staff of the university: including, but not limited to, theses and dissertations. During the last two years that the resource has been active, staff have uploaded 631 papers and they have been downloaded over 60,000 times. The content is obviously highly discoverable in Google (62% of the searches), Google Scholar (21% of the searches) and 17% from other external searches. The content is now in our own Summon search.

I want to share some data. Our first and most robust faculty collection is that of  Opus College of Business. Over 31% of the downloads and hits are content from OCB with Ethics and Business Law leading the way with over 4,000. The most downloaded paper from OCB is Jeffrey Oxman’s “Price Inflation and Stock Returns” exceeding 1,300 downloads! The dissertation from CELC with the most downloads is Emily R Murphrey’s Effective Treatment of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Early
Attachment at over 800 downloads. At 1,123 the UST Law Journal’s most downloaded article is “Incapacitation through Maiming: Chemical Castration, the Eighth Amendment, and the Denial of Human Dignity” by John Stinneford. John Heintz’s article “Developing a Library School Course in Government Statistics,” from the Library staff collections was downloaded 264 times and leads the pack.

The Law School added the University of St. Thomas Law Journal including all of the back content. And its use is 56% of the repository – nearly 30,000 downloads. We are interested in adding the other journals published here at the university.

The theses and dissertations of the College of Education, Leadership and Counseling including Education – Leadership and Education – Organization Development and Psychology are growing collections and have seen downloads in excess of 5,500. We have recently uploaded the theses of the School of Social Work. We look forward to watching their use.

Library staff article downloads and hits exceed 1,000.

If you are interested in adding your content to the repository, please contact Linda Hulbert – lahulbert@stthomas.edu.