Integrating Digital Archives and Scholarship: Raising Awareness of Library Historical Collections

Authors

Alice W. Sherwood

Language

English

Publication Date

7-16-2025

Abstract

The Texas Medical Center (TMC) is home to the largest concentration of medical professionals and experts anywhere in the world. Collectively, the Texas Medical Center is the largest employer in Houston and the 8th largest business district in the United States. The TMC includes 50 medicine-related institutions, including 21 hospitals and two specialty institutions, two medical schools, six nursing schools, and schools of dentistry, public health, and pharmacy. The TMC Library plays a vital role for the institutions inhabiting the 2.10 square mile campus that is the TMC. The Texas Medical Center Library has been around since 1915, way before Texas Medical Center existed, and the library has been utilizing Digital Commons for over 20 years. "DigitalCommons@TMC" is not only a platform for students to submit electronic dissertations, institution members to host health science related journals, but also has a wide variety of digitized archival materials. Since 2022, The TMC Library started using Digital Commons Exhibits, adding 15k items to its 18yr institution repository to include more library archival materials. Traffic of archival collections jumped from 4k, 36k to 107k downloads in 2024, bringing greater impact to not only archives, but the entire library community. Our Head of Archivist & Special Collections Librarian at McGovern Historical Center has commented that to track their statistical usage, a separate space was needed to track Digital Common was needed, which shows how much folks worldwide access materials via Digital Commons. Other beneficial impacts have been identified since additional archival materials have been integrated within our institutional repository. Other than more people who have been accessing McGovern Historical Center using their services and materials, The Texas Medical Center Library has noticed changes since more download traffic has been noticed on our institutional repository. In general, more foot traffic, in terms of students using our library services, study rooms, as well as our research materials have also increased. To date, The Texas Medical Center has been utilizing Digital Commons since 2005, starting at 2 articles in 2005, and The Texas Medical Center Library reached its 2 million download milestone in January 2024. We are looking forward to reaching our next milestone when we get to 2.5 million soon.

Keywords

archival collection, scholarship, institutional repository, Digital Commons, web traffic

Published Open-Access

yes

Recommended Citation

Alice W. Sherwood, "Integrating Digital Archives and Scholarship: Raising Awareness of Library Historical Collections" (2025). Library Staff Publications. 87.
https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/library_docs/87