Building connections, collections, and communities: Increasing the visibility and impact of extension through institutional repositories

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, university libraries have developed and manage institutional repositories-digital libraries that provide free, public access to the research, scholarship, and publications of their university's faculty, staff, and students. Although underused by Extension professionals, institutional repositories are powerful tools that can be used to raise the global visibility of Extension scholarship, highlight resources from individual initiatives and projects, provide readership statistics to demonstrate impact, and create digital archives to create topical collections and to facilitate study on the history of Extension.