As Kingsborough’s representative for CUNY Academic Works, our university’s institutional repository, I help faculty share their publications freely and openly online. This is useful work, because it increases the visibility of their work, and allows many people around the world to access scholarship that might otherwise have been unavailable to them. The institutional repository provides a second home for many publications that may be paywalled elsewhere.

My work with the institutional repository mostly involves reading about licensing and writing emails to faculty. This is not glamorous stuff, but it is rewarding work because it is increasing access to scholarly knowledge in a very tangible way: one publication at a time. It is also very typical of the behind the scenes work done by academic librarians, who keep the wheels of knowledge sharing turning, so that scholars everywhere can continue working effectively.

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