On Apr 27, 2020, at 2:33 PM, Vika Zafrin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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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