Print

Print


Dear BostonDH,

This past Friday BU's institutional repository OpenBU 
<http://open.bu.edu> reached a major milestone: we passed five million 
file downloads. This excludes internal downloads and access by bots.

OpenBU now holds 37,854 items that have been accessed worldwide. Our 
most prolific users are in the U.S., China, Turkey, Germany, United 
Kingdom, France, Russia, India, Canada, and Brazil. As a point of 
curiosity, we can get country of origin statistics for up to 160 
countries, and the last place in that list is occupied by Nicaragua (188 
downloads over the lifetime of the repository).

Our most popular item by quite a bit is this collection of images 
<https://hdl.handle.net/2144/7960> taken by Charles Samz on a trip to 
Turkey in 1971, which came into OpenBU in 2014 via the AsianARC 
<https://www.bu.edu/asianarc/about/> project. Also in the top ten are 
items from the African Ajami Library (for example, Kundin Musa Mai 
Almajirai <http://hdl.handle.net/2144/11726>) and the Recipe Boxes and 
Recipe Scrapbooks collection (for example, Helen Jones' Recipe Box 
<https://hdl.handle.net/2144/6049>).

OpenBU (then called Digital Common) first went live as a university-wide 
repository in late 2009. The statistics record quoted above actually 
begins in 2005, when Jack Ammerman first set up a repository at the 
School of Theology which he then directed. When Digital Common was 
configured, data from that earlier repository seeded it.

Huge thanks to Eleni Castro, who has been at the helm of OpenBU since 
2016, and to the rest of the Digital Scholarship Services team (staff 
<http://www.bu.edu/disc/about/staff/> and students 
<http://www.bu.edu/disc/openbu/acknowledgments/>) and members of the BU 
community that have made this possible. Onward!

All my best to you on this dreary COVID Monday,
-Vika


-- 
Dr. Vika Zafrin (she/her/hers)
Digital Scholarship Librarian
Boston University
+1 617.358.6370 | bu.edu/disc

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the BOSTONDH list, click the following link:
https://listserv.neu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=BOSTONDH