Dear BostonDH,
This past Friday BU's institutional repository OpenBU 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
taken by Charles Samz on a trip to Turkey in 1971, which came into
OpenBU in 2014 via the AsianARC
project. Also in the top ten are items from the African Ajami Library
(for example, Kundin Musa Mai
Almajirai) and the Recipe Boxes and Recipe Scrapbooks collection
(for example, Helen Jones'
Recipe Box).
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
and students)
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
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