From Freshman to Graduate : Making the Case for Student-Centric Institutional Repositories

INTRODUCTION Institutional repositories provide an opportunity to enhance the undergraduate education experience by developing student-centric collections. This article highlights five IR collections focusing on undergraduate student work at a medium size university. LITERATURE REVIEW Students benefit when they actively participate in undergraduate research activities that are tied to high-impact educational practices. However, there are limited options for undergraduate students to publish and share their work. Academic librarians are well-positioned to develop a student-centric institutional repository supporting undergraduate student research while working at instilling better information literacy standards and practices. DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT Western Oregon University’s Hamersly Library developed an institutional repository with an initial collection development strategy around undergraduate student collections based on the university’s strong identity and emphasis on undergraduate education. While traditional academic publishing opportunities are represented, there is also space and encouragement for publication of other types of student created material including presentations and creative works. There is an emphasis on representing student work from all grade levels. By connecting the student scholarship collections to high-impact educational practices, the library can advocate and demonstrate additional types of value that resonate with faculty and university administrators. NEXT STEPS The library will explore student publishing opportunities that originate in existing classes and new courses taught by librarians. Library faculty will continue to educate university administration and faculty on scholarly communication initiatives and their concerns of plagiarism and quality of work. © 2014 Passehl-Stoddart & Monge. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License, which allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. PRACTICE jlsc-pub.org | Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication Received: 01/10/2014 Accepted: 06/10/2014


INTRODUCTION
Western Oregon University's Digital Commons @ WOU has prided itself as a student-centric institutional repository (IR) since its inception in 2011. With a purposeful focus on the full undergraduate academic experience, the IR's core collections emphasize student work and the university's teaching mission. Western Oregon University serves traditional, honors, and underserved students, and the IR is a reflection of all students, not just the best and brightest. The IR is a living and breathing example of how all students grow and learn throughout their college career (Passehl & Bagley, 2012). The IR also serves to support, enhance, and capture evidence of high-impact educational practices; acts as an equitable access point to meaningful learning opportunities; and provides a platform for students to begin to develop academic confidence and an entryway into the scholarly communication learning cycle. Student-centric institutional repositories offer another way for academic libraries to support undergraduate students while working towards instilling better information literacy standards, including scholarly communication. Value to the undergraduate student experience is enhanced by connecting high-impact educational practices identified by the Association of American Colleges and Universities to student-centric collections found in institutional repositories. This article details Western Oregon University's focus on publishing student work in its institutional repository Digital Commons @ WOU by discussing individual student collections including academic events, capstone papers, student academic clubs, and the university's undergraduate peer-reviewed research journal, PURE Insights. These student collections have the ability to increase student academic confidence, provide access to student research and scholarship, introduce scholarly communication concepts and practice, offer internal and external promotion of programs, provide inclusive opportunities and documentation of student scholarship, and contribute to student retention.

LITERATURE REVIEW
There has been an increased focus on undergraduate research and creative activity after the Boyer Commission released the 1998 report: Reinventing Undergraduate Education: a Blueprint for America's Research Universities. The Boyer Report called for universities to create an inquiry-based freshman year to serve as a bridge between high school and college and to create an academic spark that would "excite the student by the wealth, diversity, scale, and scope of what lies ahead" (Boyer, 1998, p. 19). The report also called on universities to get away from lecture style courses and make inquiry-and discoverybased learning part of every course (Boyer, 1998). What undergraduate students produce in a scholarly context can be broad-anything from poems, works of art, field experiments, or poster projects (Kinkead, 2003). There has also been an increase in department and university showcases and symposiums that highlight undergraduate research, as well as both web-based and print journals in which students can publish their work (Katkin, 2003). Following the Boyer model, the ability for all undergraduate students to present and publish their work is vital to having high-impact educational practices throughout the college experience.
Scholars both in the fields of higher education and academic libraries value the impact undergraduate research activities can have on student success. Kuh and Schneider (2008) published a report that considered the types of high-impact educational practices that have positive effects on underserved students, including firstyear seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, servicelearning and community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses and projects. Finley and McNair (2013) outlined the outcomes of high-impact practices on underserved students, defined as first-generation, transfer, and underrepresented racial or ethnic minority students (p. 7). Finley and McNair (2013) found that high-impact practices had a number of positive effects on underserved students, including self-reported gains in general education, practical competence, and personal and social development. Academic libraries can contribute to these high-impact practices by collecting, preserving, publishing, and disseminating the outcomes of these activities through institutional repositories and through integrating the scholarly communication process into the undergraduate student experience.
Publication and dissemination of student scholarship is a meaningful step in the undergraduate research experience. It provides the framework for students to understand that good scholarship and creative works need to be disseminated in order to inform future scholarship and discussion; this acts as an important step into the larger academic culture and provides an opportunity for students to distinguish themselves academically (Jones & Canuel, 2013). This entry into scholarly communication, defined by ACRL as "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use" (ACRL, 2003, para. 1), has a variety of distinct benefits to undergraduate students. On an individual level, students gain autonomy and confidence in their academic pursuits while improving their technical skills in presenting information while improving their oral, written, and networking skills (Spronken-Smith et. al., 2013). On an academic level, students learn how information is organized, presented, preserved, and distributed while exploring issues such as intellectual property, copyright, open access, and author rights (Davis-Kahl, 2012;Hensley, 2013). By contributing to the scholarly process, undergraduate students leave examples for future students to explore, comment on, and move a topic forward (Davis-Kahl, 2012).
While some of these publication opportunities exist within campus departments, libraries are increasingly becoming publishers of student content within the scholarly communication process and therefore important contributors to outcomes such as student autonomy, confidence, and student success. This shift of institutional repositories incorporating student content is reflected by Kennison, Shreeves, and Harnad (2013) who argue that "libraries have built successful, thriving IRs by providing stewardship and access to...undergraduate research" (p. 1), as well as that "IRs have a role to play specifically in supporting undergraduate programs; the use of IRs to disseminate and publish original undergraduate research is becoming a critical component of formal undergraduate research programs" (p. 2). This is typically determined by institutional priorities, such as a focus on teaching versus research and the level of degrees granted on a campus.
With this developing focus on supporting student scholarship and academic work, the integration of scholarly communication into the undergraduate curriculum is becoming more important and provides new roles for librarians (Gilman, 2013). Librarians' expertise is well suited for helping undergraduate students make that final step from the research to the publication process (Hensley, 2013). Working in collaboration with faculty and academic departments, librarians can help create and provide the infrastructure for publishing undergraduate journals and creative projects (Davis-Kahl, 2012;Jones & Canuel, 2013). Embracing these trends, Hamersly Library implemented an IR with a collection development strategy to publish and promote undergraduate work based on the university's strong identity and emphasis on undergraduate education. This student-centric approach provides evidence of high-impact educational practices on campus, which can be used in many ways going forward, including a better connection to university administration, accreditation, and assessment.

UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION AT WESTERN OREGON UNIVERSITY
Established in 1856, Western Oregon University (WOU) is the oldest public university in Oregon. Located in the Willamette Valley, WOU is a comprehensive, public, midsize university that offers 62 undergraduate degree programs and 9 graduate degree programs. The current student body is approximately 6,200 undergraduate students and 400 graduate students; major populations include Oregonians, rural, economically-disadvantaged, and traditionally underrepresented groups, such as first-generation students and students of color (WOU Institutional Overview & Financial Forecast, 2014).
WOU remains focused on undergraduate education through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Education. WOU features an Honors Program that began in 1983 and the Program for Undergraduate Research Experiences (PURE). PURE sponsors two major initiatives on campus: the Academic Excellence Showcase annual day dedicated to the presentation of student scholarly activities and PURE Insights, the university's undergraduate research peer-reviewed journal.

WOU'S INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY: DIGITAL COMMONS @ WOU
With the motivation for academic libraries to support student scholarship and academic work through publication and dissemination, the library purchased Digital Commons (bepress) in late 2010. This software package was chosen to address a few limitations, including limited staffing and technology capabilities. In trying to avoid and compensate for many of the pitfalls of new institutional repositories outlined by Dorothea Salo (2013), including vague planning scope, balanced staffing, and minimal budget resources, the decision was made to align the IR's mission and vision with that of the university for a student-centric focus. Collections were sought after based on the idea of preserving a representative sampling of student work during different stages of an undergraduate student's academic career. To maximize library staff time, an emphasis was placed on collecting materials with established relationships and those featured at campus events. Digital Commons @ WOU was also based on the idea that IRs should be active, not passive, collectors of content and that repositories should be able to digitize analog content (Salo, 2008, p. 32).

CONNECTING STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP COLLECTIONS TO HIGH-IMPACT EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES
Undergraduate student scholarship collections currently represent the majority of works in the IR, followed by archival learning objects and digital collections. The library works to capture evidence of the high-impact educational practices highlighted across a student's college career and their life at WOU, from first-year seminars to final capstone papers to peer-reviewed research articles. Current materials provide evidence and examples of all students, including at-risk and underserved, in addition to highlighting honors and upper-level work. Each collection offers a unique set of benefits and challenges to the IR. Kuh and Schneider (2008) recognized that learning outcomes of high-impact educational practices focus on knowledge that is implemented across the curriculum at all stages of a student's academic career. There are key areas in the curriculum where these outcomes can be implemented and map directly to the student-centric collections in Digital Commons @ WOU: • First-Year Seminars and Experiences encourage critical inquiry while developing student's intellectual and practical skills; • Collaborative Assignments and Projects encourage students to solve problems with their peers while enhancing their own understanding of a complex issue; • Undergraduate Research provides an opportunity for students to engage in an intellectual activity that involves systemic research while addressing difficult issues; and • Capstone Course and Projects integrate student's cumulative experience and applied knowledge on a particular subject or field (Kuh & Schneider, 2008, p. 9-11).
It is important for the library to identify key projects in each of these areas to provide a broad spectrum of content for the IR. The intent is to represent all student work at the various stages of intellectual development. This article will consider five collections found in Digital Commons @ WOU that are connected to undergraduate student scholarship: First Year Experience Symposium, History Capstone and Seminar Papers, Student Clubs and Organizations, Academic Excellence Showcase Online Schedule, and PURE Insights.

First Year Experience (FYE) Symposium
(http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/fye) While WOU has offered first-year seminar courses since 1996, it was not until 2011 when the FYE Committee developed a new outcome for students enrolled in the courses-the opportunity to present their first university projects at a symposium. While the symposium has fluctuated between being mandatory or optional, it offers a setting for classes to present their final group projects to their fellow students, campus administrators, and the public. Instructors teach mostly themed courses with a variety of project formats, including posters (both borndigital and handmade), PowerPoint presentations, board games, blogs, and creative works.
The library developed a natural relation with the FYE program, as the FYE Committee included an instruction librarian. Together they determined ways to capture student work at the symposium and created permission forms and workflows. FYE instructors were asked in advance whether they wanted their classes to make their projects available through the repository; about onethird to one-half of the instructors expressed interest, depending on the year. Some instructors invited the repository librarian to give a class presentation on aspects related to scholarly communication.
Since the event serves as the last class of the term, it can be difficult to have students submit their work after the event. During the first two symposia, the digital collections librarian and library student workers approached students with permission forms and examples of the collection during the symposium. Last year, instructors were asked in advance of the symposia of their interest in supporting student work online, and those classes were divvied up amongst library staff to approach classes that already expressed interest in participating. Many students allowed the library to collect their physical posters to be photographed at a later date, as the symposium is typically very crowded with difficult lighting. Others have a digital file of their project, which the library captures on a USB drive. The library publishes a representative sampling of project formats, instructors, and themes that are now actively used in classes as examples of final projects.

History Capstone and Seminar Papers
(http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/papers) Students enrolled in the Capstone courses in the history department produce an article-length research paper. These papers were bound in volumes located in the library's reference section. In winter 2012, the library partnered with the history department to collect and publish both undergraduate and graduate-level seminar papers through the IR. This partnership drew from an existing library liaison relationship. Not only did history faculty have strong interest in encouraging their students to publish their papers online, they provided the opportunity for the digital collections librarian to present a one-shot class on issues in scholarly communication and the value of student scholarly publication and dissemination. The librarian worked with faculty to develop an online submission form designed for students to submit directly to the repository. The Capstone and Seminar Papers collection is the most heavily used collection in the IR. The history department is currently the only department participating in this digital collection; the library hopes to expand this collection into other academic departments in the future.

Student Clubs and Organizations
(http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/pat) Many student clubs and organizations that attract undergraduate student membership have an academic component to them, whether they focus around a specific discipline or work towards a common goal outside of the classroom. One such club is Phi Alpha Theta (PAT), the history honor society; members participate in the PAT regional conference held annually where both undergraduate and graduate students present research papers to an audience composed of faculty and students.
After working with the history department on the Capstone papers, the PAT faculty advisor believed Digital Commons @ WOU offered the publication and dissemination piece missing from the students' conference experience. The PAT student president approached the digital collections librarian to make their academic papers delivered at the regional conference available online. Together they wrote a proposal for students to receive a travel grant to attend the conference. As part of the proposal, students met with the repository librarian to discuss scholarly communication issues and collaborated to make their papers available online. The collection also includes the conference proceedings for each year to provide context to the papers found in the collection. The library hopes to work with more academic clubs to promote their research and service-learning components to a broader audience in the future.

Academic Excellence Showcase Online Schedule
(http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/aes_event) The Academic Excellence Showcase is an annual event held each May where students demonstrate their research and scholarship through the presentation of student scholarly activities, including original research papers, projects, artwork, and performances. The primary objectives of the Showcase are to provide an opportunity for presenters, giving them experience that will be useful in furthering their education and careers, and to expose the entire student body to the breadth and importance of the scholarship that is being conducted across campus. The event is open to the campus and surrounding community.
A new initiative developed from the relationship between the digital collections librarian serving on two faculty committees that coordinate the event: the creation of an online/mobile event schedule that lives in the IR. The schedule provided a new way to navigate the proceedings online, allowed for attendees to create an individualized schedule with automatic integration to Google and iCal calendars, and allowed for students to promote their sessions using social media. This new media tool energized both students and faculty as a valuable tool and connects them to the IR. The library hopes that the tool will assist in building goodwill and interest in further development Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication | jlsc-pub.org JL SC of the collection to include scholarly deposits of student work exhibited at the campus-wide event.

PURE Insights Journal
(http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/pure) The library, in collaboration with departments and teaching faculty, can provide the infrastructure and expertise to build upon the undergraduate research experience to support student publishing in the form of journals (Davis-Kahl, 2012). After Digital Commons @ WOU was in place, the library was looking for undergraduate projects that would be a good fit for the IR. The Program for Undergraduate Research Experience (PURE) was interested in starting a peer-reviewed journal for WOU undergraduate research articles. Initially PURE wanted a print journal, but after conversations with the library they decided to go with an online journal housed in the IR. Two librarians took the roles of Editor and Assistant Editor and worked with the PURE committee in establishing content and submission guidelines, formatting rules, and peer review procedures. The librarians also worked with a Creative Arts instructor who incorporated designing a logo and media guide (how the logo would be appear in various forms of promotional media) into a class assignment, of which the editors and PURE committee selected the winning logo. PURE Insights is the result of this collaboration.

PURE
Insights is an open-access, online, peer-reviewed journal that features WOU undergraduate student research including technical papers, research articles, expository articles, poems, short stories, photographs, videos, and other creative works from all academic disciplines. Submissions must be the original work of at least one undergraduate student with at least one WOU faculty mentor who serves as sponsor, reviewer, editor and, in some cases, several of those roles, and may be submitted up to one year after graduation. The journal features a built-in editorial workflow to facilitate the peer-review process.
In three years, this undergraduate research journal has proven to be of great interest to the WOU community and beyond with some of the top download rates in the IR. The journal is published annually in May. For the inaugural issue in 2012, there were seven featured articles, three articles in the 2013 issue, and eight articles were published in the 2014 issue. Librarians continue to serve as managing editors and collaborate with the PURE committee in selecting and soliciting reviewers, proofing the submissions, and working with the students and faculty sponsors to ensure that each piece is ready for publication.

THE VALUE OF A STUDENT-CENTRIC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY
While usage statistics and other forms of reporting can provide a quantifiable assessment of the digital student collections, especially for faculty and administrators outside of the library, there are other kinds of value that cannot be generated from statistical data. The library emphasizes five unique values associated with a student-centric IR in addition to traditional statistics and assessments.

Increases Student Academic Confidence
Many students value what they researched and created during their undergraduate experience, having put time and effort into their scholarly work. With the library disseminating undergraduate projects online, it is contributing to the foundation of building student academic confidence. Another student described her excitement towards having her work published in the IR as "Marvelous, thank you! I'm shouting it from the rooftops on my blog, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter…I appreciate your embrace of digital publishing" (Student, personal communication, March 26, 2013). The importance of building this academic confidence during a student's academic career cannot be emphasized enough; providing positive experiences for students to gain confidence in their introduction to academic life is an important value to measure.

Provides Access and Distribution to Hidden Student Scholarship and Research
In addition to building student academic confidence, a majority of undergraduate research and scholarly work goes unknown and unpublished, never moving past in-class presentations, course group projects, or presenting locally. FYE coordinators discussed how the digital collection provides an additional opportunity for students, that it gives first year students an opportunity to present their work in an educational context beyond the classroom. The FYE digital collection is important because it documents this event and gives students an opportunity to go one step farther in publishing their work so others beyond the symposium can see it." (Faculty, personal communication, July 11, 2012) Without capturing and preserving student work, it does not truly affect future research or experiences of other undergraduate students.

Introduces Scholarly Communication Theories and Practices to Students and Faculty
Many academic libraries have the infrastructure and expertise to assist with capturing student work and engaging students and faculty with scholarly communication theory and practices. Digital collections of student work, such as symposium collections or undergraduate research journals, provide the entranceway for students to move from being consumers of knowledge upon entering college to becoming creators and curators of knowledge (Hensley, 2013). Most students the library has worked with like the idea of their work being available online, discoverable in search engines, and assisting future students. Building on another repository's experience, asking students to consider if and how they want their own work to be shared and used by others shifts the nature of discussions from cautionary and reactive to reflective and proactive, and explicitly acknowledges that the students' work is valued enough to be shared if they choose. (Davis-Kahl, 2012, p. 213) This is reinforced when student authors receive a monthly email stating how many times their work has been downloaded.
The scholarly communication thread comes full circle when faculty refer students to the digital collections as evidence worth viewing for a number of reasons, including tangible examples of previous student work and incorporating student projects back into the classroom for re-use and examination. Instead of repeatedly answering the same questions from term to term, faculty can encourage students to build on previous students' work by searching the repository during the formulation of their final projects (Hensley, 2013). Faculty, having students publish their research, see the student-centric collections as a "learning laboratory" and active teaching tool for students to be exposed to scholarly communication theories such as author's rights, copyright, plagiarism, permissions, and fair use. After engaging in conversations with library faculty and seeing the benefits of student work being available through the repository, many faculty and instructors have been enthusiastic to keep the momentum going with future classes and programs.

Leads to Internal and External Promotion of Programs and Students
One of the greatest benefits of a digital collection of undergraduate student work is the ability to promote the value of a specific program or department internally on campus. Student scholarship collections have been highlighted on the university's website and linked to from departmental and academic program web pages. For the FYE Symposium Collection, it provides an opportunity for academic advisors to show prospective students and new students at registration what the FYE program is and what types of projects students complete during the course. Coordinators of the FYE Program described how the digital collection is useful for talking with potential and current instructors. One coordinator described how, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication | jlsc-pub.org

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We have a FYE instructors meeting every year after we have recruited our instructors. Last year it was difficult to explain the symposium to them because we didn't have any real examples. The digital collection is a great way of showing new instructors examples from past summits so they can understand the importance of it and also get ideas for their own final class projects. (Faculty, personal communication, July 11, 2012) Besides being used as examples of academic work in classes, faculty have reported the use of the IR as a tool for demonstrating the quality of undergraduate work outside of campus. One history professor noted that by students publishing their papers to the IR, it is "perhaps the best format we have to emphasize the outstanding work done by students in our academic programs" (Faculty, personal communication, October 5, 2012).

Provides Inclusive Opportunity and Documentation of Student Scholarship
Many institutional repositories include student scholarship, with the most popular example by far being electronic theses and dissertations. While these are important items to include as a representation of student work being produced at colleges and universities, they do not provide a representative sample of work created throughout the undergraduate experience. As Bell (2008) points out, the IR may limit who can participate in the repository, in contradiction to the idea that "higher education is…about treating people equally" (p. 3). As Finley and McNair (2013) acknowledged, there is an importance of ensuring that all students have access to high-quality learning experiences. They also note that educators may be missing opportunities to optimize learning gains by fully distributing engaged learning practices across the entire undergraduate experience. More intentional practices within the sophomore and junior years can connect high-impact learning in the first and senior years, resulting in expanded and integrative cornerstone-to-capstone experiences. (p. 33) If libraries limit their scholarly communication activities to focus solely on those students graduating at the end of their academic career, they are not providing the access needed to impact student success at all levels.
Hamersly Library's student-centered IR gathers materials throughout the undergraduate student experience, from first-year students' seminar projects to upper division students' research articles published in the undergraduate research journal PURE Insights. Acknowledging that "not just single, but multiple high-impact practices, can influence students' perceptions of their learning" (Finley & McNair, 2013, p. 19), by publishing materials that hit upon multiple high-impact educational practices, student authors may have more than one item included in the repository. Since the author field acts as a live link within the repository, by clicking on the author's name, users can see if the author has created more than one item in the collection. From there, it is possible to see advances in a student's writing and critical thinking, something that is made much easier if institutional repositories are collecting student work throughout the curriculum and undergraduate experience.

Contributes to Student Retention
While there is no assessment tool that directly ties student retention to students who engage with IRs, there is evidence of attributes entwined with repositories having a positive effect on student retention. Steven Bell (2008) stated that "robust relationships that give meaning to students encourage them to persist and keep them engaged with their academic life" (p. 1). Bell also described how the academic library can play a role in supporting activities such as student engagement with staff, academic success, having good out-of-class educational experiences, and having a support network all contribute to student retention (p. 4). The benefits that come with engaging students with scholarly communication in an IR and promoting their work online are in alignment with improving student retention on campus.

COMMON CHALLENGES FACING DIGITAL COMMONS @ WOU
Regardless of the type of student scholarship collections created in the institutional repository, common challenges and concerns have emerged from the process. Three overarching challenges that the library continues to grapple with are publicity, permissions, and selling the IR to faculty and administration.
Institutional repositories have inherent problems with publicity-many times they include jargon-heavy terms that neither students nor faculty understand. This leaves an inherent chicken or the egg problem: does the library publicize the IR without content or does the library build content and then publicize? The library struggled with this issue until spring 2014, when the IR was added to the library's main search box as a facet. By using a Google custom search and placing the name "Digital Commons" above the search box, the library hopes it will be the start of a name recognition campaign.
The library has grappled with gaining permissions for student work, but not from the audience anticipated. Students have been easy to work with and grasp what it means to make their work available online. The challenge comes from the faculty, who has expressed concerns over posting student work for two main reasons: plagiarism and quality of work. Faculty are concerned that if work is posted online other students will download and use it, submit it as their own work for other assignments.
Faculty are also concerned about the quality of work submitted and how it might reflect upon a particular course (Jones & Canuel, 2013). This is where the library continues to have conversations with faculty, educating them on scholarly communication issues and the benefits of having students learn more about information literacy. A common theme that permeates many conversations in the library is how to build goodwill towards the IR amongst the faculty.
As the library identifies and builds relationships with receptive groups on campus, the larger challenge of promoting the functionality of the IR among all faculty and administration remains difficult. Beyond pure academic content, library faculty look for other opportunities where the IR can assist with activities on campus. One example is how the IR can assist with internal and external promotion for academic departments and the university. Recently the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences announced it is looking to create student profiles highlighting undergraduate education at WOU. The digital collections librarian has been in talks with the college about highlighting students that have scholarly work in the IR. These types of activities can help faculty to see the IR in new and different ways and will hopefully assist with issues around permissions and selectivity, as well as selling the IR in a positive light.
The library continues to look for new opportunities for incorporation into various administrative and report-ing structures on campus, including departmental accreditation reports and assessment initiatives. By providing administrative assistance along with demonstrating how the IR can provide value to the student experience, the library hopes to clear up some of the current challenges facing the IR.

NEXT STEPS
Three years after the implementation of Digital Commons @ WOU, the library continues to support undergraduate students and programs by publishing and disseminating their scholarship and creative works. The library will continue to address major stakeholders on campus, including central administration and faculty. The library has already received positive feedback from administrators, including how it can be used for internal and external promotion of academic programs and access and distribution of hidden student scholarship and creative work worldwide. Statistics of total number of downloads and views also help administrators and faculty to understand the virtual reach of the IR. Library staff will continue to educate faculty on scholarly communication initiatives and address their concerns of plagiarism and quality of student work.
Education and advocacy for the IR will come from Hamersly Library engaging students and faculty with scholarly communication in the curriculum, as well as through one-shot class interactions and campus events.
Believing that "the best opportunity to engage students in critical thinking and discussion about scholarly communication is within the context of an academic course or program" (Gilman, 2013, p. 90), library faculty are working towards regular integration into the campus curriculum, both through classes already offered and new courses taught by librarians. Future library courses in advanced research methods will address similar student information literacy needs (Lowe & Stone, 2014), including attribution, evaluation of sources, communication of evidence, as well as copyright, fair use, licensing, and alternative publishing models and how they can be used on campus (Nolan & Costanza, 2006). The library will continue to look for ways to add value and be a more active learning partner on campus through the integration of scholarly communication. As Hensley, Shreeves, and Davis-Kahl (2014) acknowledged, "by adopting the role of publisher, libraries have the opportunity to evolve information literacy instruction to Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication | jlsc-pub.org JL SC engage undergraduate researchers on issues of intellectual property, copyright, and open access" (p. 21).
While Digital Commons @ WOU has prided itself on its student-centric focus, every collection requires partnerships and relationship building. The development of student scholarship collections on campus will hopefully act as a doorway to encourage faculty to deposit publications and creative works in the future. As the IR continues to grow, the library looks to leverage new and existing opportunities to strengthen discussions around scholarly communication, undergraduate research, and high-impact learning practices on campus. The library will continue to "create new resources for students to build on in future years, contribute to the institution's historical record, and perhaps most importantly, disseminate an underused body of knowledge" (Hensley, Shreeves, & Davis-Kahl, 2014, p. 21).