A library team enhanced the discoverability and accessibility of scholarly works this summer, specifically electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) of Vanderbilt graduate students and the eight open access journals hosted by the library and edited by Vanderbilt faculty and students. Amazingly, those eight open access journals have published over 1,300 articles across 77 issues!
The process of adding ETDs to the Vanderbilt University Institutional Repository and to the library catalog has now been made easier and with less staff intervention, while at the same time maximizing discovery by Google Scholar and other search engines. The team migrated over 4,900 ETDs from the old database to the institutional repository.
Also improved are the documentation and workflow to add open access journals to the library catalog and discovery of those as well. Among next steps will be easing the process for finding open access journal articles, and then improving the discoverability of them in the library catalog.