From the Sheridan Libraries’ home page, there is a drop-down menu of the databases available to the Hopkins community. That is where you’ll find JScholarship, a digital repository of research conducted at Johns Hopkins.
The mission of JScholarship is “to gather, distribute, and preserve digital materials related to the Johns Hopkins research and instructional mission.” Such a brief statement for such a powerful tool!
From this database, access is gained to a varied and huge (and ever-growing!) compilation of research papers, dissertations, technical reports, data, environmental project reports, symposia proceedings and map and atlas images.
According to David Reynolds, Manager of Scholarly Digital Initiatives for Sheridan Libraries, the site has, in a typical month, 13,311 visits from 11,376 unique visitors. These scholars hail from 133 countries, which make JScholarship a truly international source of current and archived information. The repository houses 33,285 discrete items and has had over 400,000 visits since its launch in 2008!
“The Sheridan Libraries has identified JScholarship as a core service, so we are committed to maintaining it for the foreseeable future,” Reynolds says of the long-range possibilities of JScholarship. “We will provide persistent URLs that enable access to content to anyone with an Internet connection. Obviously technological standards and formats change, so we cannot guarantee that every format deposited in JScholarship will be viable in the long term. To that end, we advise depositors to choose formats which stand the best chance of surviving well into the future.” Good choices include formats such as PDF and JPEG that are widely supported in browsers, or those that are relatively open and transparent such as OpenOffice.