Guest post: Academic Commons and Social Media

"Join the Conversation at @ResearchAtCU, the Twitter Feed for Academic Commons ...   The interns here at the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) have been tweeting about research in Academic Commons all summer. In case you didn’t hear, Academic Commons is Columbia University’s digital repository that is freely available to the public. It currently holds 10,747 items of research, including scholarly work, presentations, the latest studies and statistics, and videos. After several months of tweeting and collecting data about Twitter users engaging with the Academic Commons Twitter feed, @ResearchAtCU, we found that research in Academic Commons is spreading at a rapid rate—and it is reaching far beyond Columbia’s local community. During the month of August 2013, users from 13 countries viewed the links we posted at @ResearchAtCU. Links to Academic Commons research content were clicked on a total of 329 times during this month ... Open access and delivering information instantly are important factors in this widespread growth. For instance, after we tweeted about the CDRS book chapter Emerging Opportunities in Library Services: Planning for the Future of Scholarly Publishing, it was downloaded from Academic Commons 364 times in just five days. In less than one month, this number reached a high of 596 downloads ... Similar results were seen when we promoted the Academic Commons-archived report Disaster Recovery: Guidance for Donors at @ResearchAtCU. We discovered a steady rise in interest with an increase of downloads from 10 to 716 over the course of three months.  These are just a few examples that show how social media is proving to be an effective tool for our repository. We have determined that with a combination of open access and an online presence, libraries and repositories can improve delivery of information to users. Keep this conversation alive. Visit us on Twitter at @ResearchAtCU, and don’t miss out on all of the available content at Academic Commons. We encourage all faculty, students, staff, and alumni of Columbia and its affiliates –Barnard College, Teachers College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Union Theological Seminary – to deposit materials in the repository.  For more information about Academic Commons and depositing materials, head toacademiccommons.columbia.edu. Let’s continue to share research and learn more about #whyopenworks."