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About ScholarWorks

ScholarWorks is part of a suite of services provided by the Scholarly Communications and Data Management (SCDM) unit at Boise State University’s Albertsons Library. It captures and showcases the scholarly output of the Boise State community and works in conjunction with the Boise State Experts Portal to provide a more comprehensive view of faculty research and activity while maintaining distinct roles. ScholarWorks serves as the institutional repository for providing access to full-text works, while the Experts Portal provides researcher profiles and highlights connections across scholarly outputs. Additional data management services are provided in collaboration with the Library’s Research Data Management Group (RDMG).

Services include:

• Identifying and making scholarship openly available through ScholarWorks, including documents and files produced by faculty, research groups, and students;
• Supporting Experts Portal profiles that highlight the scholarly accomplishments of individual faculty members;
• Distributing regular reports that provide data on the impact and usage of faculty publications;
• Providing access to simple and cost-effective electronic publishing for original series, journals, and monographs; and
• Promoting research through a searchable database, reports to key administrators and stakeholders, and coordination with other research recognition activities.

Including a document in ScholarWorks provides faculty, staff, and students with many advantages:

• Enhances professional visibility and impact through broader dissemination and increased use of research;
• Supports graduate scholarship by providing public access to theses and dissertations;
• Offers a quick, efficient, and cost-effective method for sharing research;
• Helps remove access barriers to research and publicly funded scholarship;
• Supports Boise State’s scholarly communication efforts by facilitating the publishing and dissemination process; and
• Provides authors with monthly download reports to track how often their work is accessed.

The Experts Portal further supports research visibility and discovery by:

• Linking ScholarWorks records to related Experts profiles;
• Enabling the creation of abstract-only records for publications that do not have full-text content in ScholarWorks; and
• Showcasing connections among faculty, research outputs, and institutional activity, including: shared topics, collaborators, departments, external institutions, equipment, and grants.

ScholarWorks' Values Statement

The Boise State University Statement of Values and Standards of Conduct establishes a foundation for acceptable behavior. In addition to these university wide values, the ScholarWorks and Data Management unit has identified several additional values that should be expressed through our work.

• INTEGRITY: We must demonstrate integrity in openly disseminating information resources and exercise this value on the behalf of our patrons. As information management experts, we recognize that there are issues that must be addressed (privacy, preservation, access barriers, right to read, etc.) that are not always self-evident to the original creators. Therefore, we must utilize our skills and professional judgement to integrate the expectation of service to patrons with high quality information management.


• EMPOWERMENT: The mission of libraries is to empower and we need to view empowerment for our patrons, our colleagues, and ourselves as an important quality to be valued. When developing policies, providing services, and designing tools and resources, we should consider if these actions enable the people affected to make informed decisions and appropriately exercise their free will.


• DEMOCRATIZATION OF INFORMATION: This term is used to describe the free flowing of ideas and information. This is a value for our unit as we work to overcome fee barriers to academic resources ensuring access to information for all. When thinking of this value, it is also useful to consider related barriers such as censorship, mono-language resources, and cognitive, sensory, and physical disabilities of patrons.


• PATRON PERSPECTIVE: In all that we do, we should strive to see things from the perspective of the patron. This may include communicating in language that they will understand, respecting their concerns, prioritizing their problems, and supporting their goals and dreams.