University Libraries’ Aquila Marks 10th Anniversary

Thu, 01/27/2022 - 01:18pm | By: David Tisdale

Aquila, the University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) online institutional repository featuring the cutting-edge research of University of Southern Mississippi (USM) faculty and students, is marking a decade as an important resource for those who can benefit from access to the school’s scholarly and creative activity.  

Aquila includes everything from faculty publications, student theses and dissertations, recorded conference sessions and original journals published directly through the online repository, among many other resources.

“It was launched as a means to take the excellent scholarly work that’s being done at the university and make that available globally,” said Josh Cromwell, scholarly communications manager for University Libraries and administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. “To that point, thus far the content in Aquila has been downloaded just around 4,250,000 times by researchers from 238 different countries.”

Cromwell says Aquila is a win-win for USM faculty and students and those who access Aquila online to pursue information and inspiration for their own research goals and knowledge base development. “Our faculty and students benefit because they’re able to get their research out to a much broader audience than they would otherwise, and outside researchers benefit because they gain access to all of this quality scholarship that they can use to strengthen their own research,” Cromwell further noted.

Over the last 10 years, several new features and content types have been added to enhance Aquila, including most recently support of streaming media. Previously, visitors to Aquila had to either link out to streaming media on other platforms, but now embedded audio and video are accessible. In addition, a new readership map on the Aquila homepage and within individual collections allow users to see exactly where in the world their content is being downloaded.

“It’s (readership map) a great visual representation of the global reach of Aquila,” Cromwell said. “We’ve also added support for datasets and the capacity to assign DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) to items in Aquila, which ensures that access to that content remains perpetual even if the content itself moves to a new location.”

Cromwell joined University Libraries in 2011 and played a role in the setup and launch of Aquila in January 2012. He has served as Aquila administrator since mid-2013.

“We’ve grown a lot over the past 10 years, but we’re not looking to rest on our laurels,” Cromwell said. “We’re always interested in new projects or content we can add to Aquila, whether that be an individual faculty member’s research, journals produced on campus that would benefit from our publishing services, recordings of guest lectures or panels that take place across campus, new open textbooks or OER (Open Educational Resources), scholarly books or manuscripts that might be useful for researchers but would not fit the publication profile of a traditional publisher, and other ideas we’ve not yet considered.”

To learn more about Aquila, visit https://aquila.usm.edu/