After being operational for two months, “The Keep,” which digitally archives research and other informational materials, became the fifth largest institutional repository in Illinois.

Todd Bruns, the institutional repository librarian at Booth Library, said “The Keep” launched as a soft rollout, meaning they have gradually added content to it.

Bruns presented the Faculty Senate with a tour of “The Keep” at its meeting on Tuesday, and he said they began creating it about a year ago.

“We began pulling together administrative output, faculty research and creative activity, and student honors for the past year,” Bruns said.

“The Keep” consists of many categories including academic colleges, departments, offices, faculty research, student theses and publications, conferences, events and journals.

Each category contains three automatic subcategories, which are events and exhibits, faculty research and creative activity, and student honors theses.

Faculty can add more subcategories depending on how they want to organize their information, Bruns said.

“Some faculty members who do research in particular areas can create subject-matter categories and bundle their articles,” Bruns said. “It is a good way to communicate to the world that this is the research you do in the areas you do them in.”

Faculty members create their web pages through the program Selected Works, where they can include word, audio and video files.

Different departments contain different subcategories such as the Theatre Arts Department, which lists productions ranging from the 1940s to the present.

After two months, 3,872 papers have been archived and 3,868 downloads were made.

Bruns said they also work with publishers to check the copyright status of research that has been published in different journals.

Unlike many web bases that record published information, “The Keep” is an open-access platform, meaning the content is free to view.

“The goal of ‘The Keep’ is to gather a history of information materials from those at Eastern and make it available around the world,” Bruns said.

Bruns presented information from a citation-rate study done comparing open-access archives to journals that keep content locked from free public views for six months.

“The difference within the first 10 months was that open-access articles were being cited twice as much, and after 10 months, they were being cited three times as much,” Bruns said.

“The Keep” is also based on a stabilized platform so the URLs will not change.

“Most typical websites go through redesigns and the URLs would change, but the URLs in ‘The Keep’ remain the same,” Bruns said.

He said “The Keep” also embodies the common saying at the library that “lots of copies keep stuff safe” because they save the content to multiple servers.

“The Keep” revolves around the theme of Old Main to give viewers a flavor of Eastern, Bruns said.

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].