A Million Reasons to Read

Seattle University’s repository for works by the university community, ScholarWorks, hit a monumental milestone in November, clocking 1 million downloads since starting in May 2017, with three undergraduate research papers topping the list of most downloaded.

Though ScholarWorks collects works by students, faculty and staff, its most popular works come from the Seattle University Undergraduate Research Journal (SUURJ), a peer-reviewed online publication of research by undergraduate students.

“The Role of British Colonial Policy in the South Sudanese Civil War: A Postcolonial Conflict Analysis,” “The Relationship Between White Supremacy and Capitalism: A Socioeconomic Study on Embeddedness in the Market and Society” and “‘Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen’: The Disempowerment of Women’s Voices in the Film Mean Girls,” round out the top materials downloaded from ScholarWorks.

“I’m not surprised that those are the most downloaded,” says Yen Tran, scholarly services librarian for the Lemieux Library and McGoldrick Learning Commons and manager of ScholarWorks. “Student research is of high interest and we do have a lot of undergraduate student work in ScholarWorks.”

ScholarWorks also holds university historical records, such as commencement brochures, as well as past issues of the student newspaper The Spectator.

With many publications moving online and not publishing all its content in print, ScholarWorks also started archiving online-only stories from The Spectator, which started during the COVID-19 shutdown, says Tran.

Additionally, ScholarWorks has begun archiving SU’s literary and visual art journal, Fragments.

Though ScholarWorks collects the work of the SU community, it is accessible to the public.

“Anybody who has an internet connection can read the work being created by SU students, staff and faculty and, indeed, they have received global readership,” says Tran.