Students and faculty at Linfield are fortunate to have a free open access repository to display their scholastic works.

The Digital Commons webpage, which was launched in summer 2010, has been around for five years.

“We wanted to provide a space to collect the scholarly work students and faculty have done,” said Digital Commons coordinator Kathleen Spring who is also the collections management librarian at Nicholson Library.

All disciplines and departments at Linfield use the repository.

Students who submit their work to Linfield’s annual student symposium will also get it uploaded to the website.

“The website can be helpful for students looking to build their online portfolio to show future employers or graduate schools what they have done,” Spring said.

The website is powered by Berkeley Electronic Press which allows Spring and others to monitor how often people are viewing the website as well as how many times student or faculty work gets downloaded.

Many of the other libraries that are a part of the Summit Library have digital repositories that show their institutions’s student and faculty scholastic work.

Spring and others at Nicholson are working to get scholastic work from the Digital Commons linked to the searches from the Linfield Libraries home page search box.

Currently, if someone was to search a student or faculty’s name and their work in a Google search they could access it because the Digital Commons is a free repository for everyone.

Spring also mentioned she works with students and faculty who have created an art exhibit in the Linfield Gallery by documenting it through photos and written work that best describes what the gallery looked like.

Students can also submit their scholastic work to Quercus, which is Linfield’s Undergraduate Journal.

Other materials that are viewable on the website include online copies of the Linfield Magazine as well as student work submitted to Quercus.

Videos from faculty and guest lectures from different lecture series can be accessed from the website as well.

All items uploaded to Digital Commons are available for download and can be emailed or shared to social media sites.

There is also a page that displays a list of faculty publications and where they can be purchased.

“Many students will submit their thesis to the Digital Commons so employers or graduate schools can look at and download their scholastic work,” Spring said.

The Linfield Center For The Northwest as well as the Linfield Archives use the webpage to display work that they and students who intern with them are doing.

Most faculty submit their work to the Digital Commons. “It depends on the time of year … but there are certain times when most (faculty) will submit their work. It depends on when they have time,” Spring said.

Students and faculty who are on Nicholson’s READ posters are also available for download via the Digital Commons.

“We would love to see more people use it,” Spring said.

The Digital Commons can help students build their portfolio by submitting their own work as well as viewing other students and faculty’s work if they are curious and what to learn more about some of their professors.