Ursinus Digital Commons Reaches One Million Downloads

Myrin Library is pleased to announce that Digital Commons@Ursinus, launched at the end of 2014, has reached a new milestone in its nine-year history by surpassing one million downloads. The repository and its reach have steadily grown over the years, with nearly fifteen thousand items currently available. Student Honors and Summer Fellows research, along with projects, presentations and works of art are represented across the disciplines – as are faculty publications. Library archives and special collections are being digitized and made available to researchers on campus and around the world and there are growing opportunities for special partnerships with the community to tell the stories of our local region. Documents, images, streaming video, podcasts, and oral histories are among the wide variety of material types found within.

Collection highlights from around the campus include the Annual Student Art Exhibition and lectures from the Berman Museum of Art; BEAR Innovation and Digital Spark presentations from the U-Imagine Center; and open mathematical educational resources from the grant-funded TRIUMPHS project (some of the most frequently downloaded items in the repository).

Community projects include digitized newspapers held by Historic Trappe and oral histories and a timeline documenting the story of the Mill at Anselma.

Highlights from our digital Archives include student newspapers (one of our most frequently downloaded publications), the Ruby yearbooks, the Lantern literary magazines, alumni journals, college catalogues and the Eleanor Frost Snell collection.

Our Library Special Collections feature the John Henry Augustus Bomberger collection and the papers of diplomat and Assistant Secretary of State Huntington Wilson. The journals of the Pennsylvania Folklife Society are some of the most frequently downloaded items in the repository – in addition to the Pennsylvania German fraktur collection and the papers of folklife pioneer Alfred L. Shoemaker.

Among the most frequently downloaded items across the entire repository are the following student Honors theses and Summer Fellows projects:

Cool Japan and the Hallyu Wave: The Effect of Popular Culture Exports on National Image and Soft Power by Gillianne Lux

Female Moments / Male Structures: The Representation of Women in Romantic Comedies by Jordan Scharaga

Peace, Love, and Politics: How Woodstock of 1969 Epitomized the Relationship Between Social Movements and Music by Jacklynn Ramsey

What is Magic to the LaVeyan-Satanist Ideal Type?: A Content-Analysis of the Satanic Bible’s Descriptions of Magic by Carter E. Timon

Hoop Dreams: An Empirical Analysis of the Gender Wage Gap in Professional Basketball by Hailey DiCicco

Do Ugly Criminals Receive Harsher Sentences? An Analysis of Lookism in the Criminal Justice System by Kelly Beck

The Digital Commons repository is always growing in new and exciting ways – and it’s never too late to get involved! If you’d like to see your research or publications highlighted or you have students doing special projects, independent research or capstone work, please reach out to Andy Prock, Associate Director of Preservation, Digitization and Discovery Services. We want your Department represented and part of the next million downloads!