A new portal on KiltHub, the institutional repository for CMU, provides a public view of the research written by students in the Tepper Undergraduate Economics program.
How did this collection come to be?
In 2019, Carol Goldburg, Executive Director of the Tepper Undergraduate Economics Program reached out to Ryan Splenda, Liaison Librarian to the Tepper School about the possibility of creating a page on their website that highlights the previous undergraduate honors theses that graduates of the program produced in the hopes of giving prospective students an idea of the types of research that can be conducted while at Tepper. Ryan suggested to Carol that the honors theses collection can be housed in KiltHub, CMU's Institutional Repository, and a portal page can be created and linked to on the Undergraduate Economics website. Carol expressed interest in this, and a series of meetings ensued between Carol, Ryan, Katie Behrman (Institutional Repository Manager), and Dave Scherer (Scholarly Communications and Research Curation Consultant) that led to this project coming to fruition. A workflow was established that includes securing the permissions from undergrad economics students to make their theses open access and available in KiltHub, a process for migrating the existing theses into KiltHub with appropriate metadata assigned to each thesis, and a process for future thesis deposits to KiltHub. Eleven months of hard work later, we are pleased to report that the Tepper Honors Theses collection is now available.
What is KiltHub?
Provided by the University Libraries, KiltHub is the comprehensive institutional repository and research collaboration platform for research data and scholarly outputs produced by members of Carnegie Mellon University and their collaborators. KiltHub collects, preserves, and provides stable, long-term global open access to a wide range of research data and scholarly outputs created by faculty, staff, and student members of Carnegie Mellon University in the course of their research and teaching, including theses and dissertations from undergraduate and graduate students.
Is this the first KiltHub portal for undergrad theses?
No it's not. Beyond the graduate student Thesis and Dissertation collection, KiltHub also maintains a collection of honors theses from the Dietrich College.
Why is this portal significant?
The Tepper Undergrad Econ Theses are hosted by the comprehensive institutional repository of CMU, KiltHub, which has a mission of collecting and making the scholarship and research of the CMU community openly available. This portal is significant because it provides a public view of the research written by students in the Tepper Undergraduate Economics program. It allows current students to see examples of previously published works as a source of ideas for their own theses, and it gives prospective students a view into the types of scholarship that they can undertake as a student of the Undergraduate Economics program at the Tepper School of Business.
What will this portal enable? What does it allow users to do?
This portal enables anyone with access to the internet to view, download, and cite the theses written by students in the Tepper School of Business' Undergraduate Economics program. Because these works are hosted on KiltHub, they receive the same benefits of all scholarship and research hosted by the repository. This includes increased discoverability, indexing by major search engines such as Google, a recommended citation with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and tracking of metrics from the views, downloads, citations, and alternative metrics (‘altmetrics') gathered from social media, print media mentions, blogs, and readership lists.
Is this something that would be possible for other units?
Yes. Undergraduate theses are faculty-sponsored works and vetted by undergraduate research programs. The University Libraries is eager to support and host undergraduate theses from around the university.
If other units want this, how would they request it?
Units interested in creating their own collection for undergraduate theses should contact the KiltHub team at KiltHub@andrew.cmu.edu. We'll work with program administrators to create a workflow based on their individual program and the Libraries' metadata description and file requirements.
- Katie Behrman, Institutional Repository Specialist; David Scherer, Scholarly Communications and Research Curation Consultant, Librarian; and Ryan Splenda, Business and Economics Librarian