11/06/18
HAYS, Kan. – Fort Hays State University’s Forsyth Library hosted the second annual Digital Commons Heartland User’s Group Regional Conference.

The conference was organized by Jennifer Sauer, coordinator of scholar services and electronic resources and discovery services librarian, and Elizabeth Downing, digital curation librarian.

“Over two days, the conference focused on sharing ideas, innovations and the best practices for institutional repositories,” said Downing.

Mark Eberle, Biological Sciences lab coordinator at Fort Hays State, was the keynote speaker and talked, from an author’s perspective, about the library as a publisher.

Other featured presenters at the conference were from Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, the Missouri Science & Technology University, Rutgers University, the University of Denver, and Southwestern Oklahoma State University.

This conference was specifically for users of the Digital Commons platform hosted by bepress. Representatives from the company gave updates and answered questions.

“Digital Commons is a really powerful network,” said Sauer “Content gets picked up and indexed across the Internet fast, so it will come up in a lot of search inquiries and drive even more traffic to the FHSU Scholars Repository.”

Since contracting Digital Commons in 2015, FHSU has seen over 103,000 downloads on faculty and student work that has been published.

“We do a lot of great scholarship here at Fort Hays State,” said Downing “Because these are now indexed in Google Scholar, they are really discoverable by everybody.”

The conference was made possible by contributions from the Forsyth Library dean’s office, the Office of the Provost and bepress.