ACU Library is thrilled to announce the university’s online, open-access digital repository reached a significant milestone with its one-millionth download!
By means of Digital Commons @ ACU (DC@ACU) Brown Library increases awareness and accessibility of the intellectual output of Abilene Christian University, its students and faculty, and its uniquely-held library and special collections. We preserve and provide access to student and faculty work, such as working papers, published articles, conference papers, presentations, senior theses, graduate theses and dissertations. University Special Collections and Archives utilizes DC@ACU to disseminate uniquely-held or otherwise unavailable archival materials, rare books, and periodicals as well as a range of historic university archives, media, and records. The millionth download came in late December 2021.
Since its launch in September 2014 DC@ACU has been led by a team headquartered in the Brown Library. Among the earliest collections posted were student theses and dissertations and sets of materials from special collections and archives. These two sets remain the most-viewed and most-downloaded. Student theses (575 items) have been downloaded over 385,000 times. Rare print holdings from the Stone-Campbell Movement, reflecting the historic faith commitment of ACU, contains almost 25,000 books, periodical issues, photographs, archival material and audio-visual files, have been downloaded over 485,000 times.
DC@ACU usage map 2014-2021
Add to that faculty work from across the university along with open-access scholarly journals, and the platform has reached users on every continent except Antartica (one day!). That users from 18,884 institutions in 225 countries have accessed these materials clearly indicate the powerful reach of the platform. Looking back, we can see how the platform was well-established by the end of 2019, just in time to serve user needs in 2020 and 2021 when many people around the world were online more, and have come to expect that research-quality materials can be readily and openly accessible on the web.
DC@ACU downloads by month 2014-2021
Top ten most-viewed items