EIU Booth Library

Many facets of The Keep

Posted on May 4th, 2021

This week is National Library Week across the USA! It is a time to celebrate our nations libraries, library workers’ contributions and promote library use and support.

The theme for National Library Week 2021 is “Welcome to Your Library.” 

During the pandemic, library workers continue to exceed their communities’ demands and adapt resources and services to meet their users’ needs during these challenging times. Whether people visit in person or virtually, libraries offer endless opportunities to transform lives through education and lifelong learning. All this week we will be posting news items about some of the many information resources Booth Library offers our community beyond 4 walls. Today’s entry lists the variety of services provided to our community by Scholarly Communications Librarian Todd Bruns and the Institutional repository at EIU, The Keep.

Many people know The Keep as the repository of open access archive of the scholarship, creative output and administrative records of Eastern Illinois University. Since its adoption, more than 2.5 million documents have been downloaded around the world from The Keep.

What most people don’t know is that The Keep is also a publishing platform. EIU currently hosts the publication of six peer-reviewed journals.

The Keep serves as conference and event site platform which allows a fully functioning submission, review and publishing space for physical and virtual conferences.

The Keep is also a valuable platform to feature EIU’s wonderful faculty. The Selected Works pages within The Keep create a powerful and versatile website for faculty to maintain a record of their scholarly output. Selected Works Galleries can be organized by department or expertise and embedded within external sites.

Perhaps best of all, participating in The Keep means that our university’s scholarly and creative output is optimized for discovery by scholars, students and prospective students around the world in Google, Digital Commons Network, and all major search engines.