University Libraries houses both the scholarly repository VTechWorks and the institutional data repository. Both repositories are seeing an increase in downloads, views, and Virginia Tech faculty who upload their work to share openly with the world.

Users from 122 countries visited or downloaded data from the Virginia Tech institutional data repository during FY23.

The repository logged more than 55,000 downloads and 90,000 views, with the most activity coming from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Virginia Tech faculty are taking advantage of  University Libraries data services team to curate and upload 62 new datasets to the repository.

  “These numbers meet my expectations,” said Jon Petters, associate director for data management and curation services. “For dataset publications, it’s a big increase from where we were two years ago (at 37 data set uploads) when we migrated to our new repository platform. Now that we have data publication workflows that are positioned to scale up, I anticipate conducting further outreach this year toward increasing these dataset publication numbers in the future.”

    “Once we have a longer track record of existence we can expect to see our published datasets show up in reference lists for peer-reviewed research publications,” said Petters. “That’ll be interesting to track when the time comes!”

VTechWorks, Virginia Tech’s scholarly repository created in 2010, logged close to 17 million file downloads — a 196% usage increase from the previous year. The VTechWorks team also received a 230% increase in requests for embargoed electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) over the last year.

    “We get these daily from users all over the world and pass them on to the authors who can then decide to make the item public, share the file with the requestor, or deny the request,” said Philip Young, University Libraries’ institutional repository manager. “ETDs are usually embargoed because the authors are publishing papers or a book derived from the work.”