New Library-curated Faculty Profile Platform Launches Through bepress

February 1st, 2016

As faculty needs evolve and become increasingly digital, libraries are feeling the pressure to provide relevant new services. At the same time, faculty members are struggling to create and maintain their professional reputations online. We at bepress are happy to announce the new SelectedWorks, the fully hosted, library-curated faculty profile platform that positions the library to better support faculty as well as the institution at large.

Beverly Lysobey, Digital Commons and Resource Management Librarian, at Sacred Heart University, says:

“Both faculty and administration have been impressed with the services we provide through SelectedWorks; we’re able to show how much our faculty really publishes, and it’s great for professors to get that recognition. We’ve had several faculty members approach us for help making sure their record was complete when they were up for tenure, and we’ve even found articles that authors themselves no longer had access to.”

With consistent, organized, institution-branded profiles, SelectedWorks increases campus-wide exposure and supports the research mission of the university. As the only profile platform integrated with the fully hosted Digital Commons suite of publishing and repository services, it also ensures that the institution retains management of its content. Powerful integration with the Digital Commons platform lets the home institution more fully capture the range of scholarship produced on campus, and hosted services facilitate resource consolidation and reduces strain on IT.

The new SelectedWorks features a modern, streamlined design that provides compelling display options for the full range of faculty work. It beautifully showcases streaming media, images, data, teaching materials, books – any type of content that researchers now produce as part of their scholarship.

Detailed analytics tools let authors and librarians measure global readership and track impact for a variety of campus stakeholders: authors can see the universities, agencies, and businesses that are reading their work, and can easily export reports to use in tenure and promotion dossiers. Janelle Wertzbeger, Assistant Dean and Director of Scholarly Communications at Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library, says, “The new author dashboard maps and enhanced readership are SO GOOD. Every professor up for promotion & tenure should use them!”

And of course, SelectedWorks is fully backed by the continual efforts of the bepress development team to provide maximum discoverability to search engines, increasing impact for faculty and institutions alike: Reverend Edward R. Udovic, Vice President for Teaching and Learning Resources at DePaul University, says, “In the last several months downloads of my scholarship from my [SelectedWorks] site have far surpassed the total distribution of all my work in the previous twenty five years.”

About bepress

Founded by professors in 1999, bepress exists to serve academia. We deliver scholarly communications and publishing services for academic institutions, empowering their communities to showcase and share their works for maximum impact. Through our services bepress seeks to link communities of scholars, listen to their needs, and provide solutions to support emerging academic missions and goals.

Bepress is the provider of Digital Commons, the leading hosted institutional repository software platform. Digital Commons is a suite of tools and services that enables institutions to manage, display, and publish scholarship to the web in a beautiful, highly visible showcase. Digital Commons offers the features of a traditional IR as well as professional-grade publishing software, management tools, and individual faculty and researcher pages to promote and disseminate scholarship and serve academia.

With Digital Commons, universities can collect, preserve, and make visible all of their intellectual output, including pre-prints, working papers, journal articles, dissertations, master’s theses, conference proceedings, presentations, creative works, and a wide variety of other content types.