Academic Expressions

Office of the Provost

The west mall at Missouri State University
(Photo by Jesse Scheve/Missouri State University)

Increasing Missouri State’s Visibility

Tom Peters shares how systems like BearWorks and events like the Smithsonian Folklife Festival bring our expertise to audiences around the world.

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BearWorks, Missouri State’s institutional repository, collects digital copies of scholarship created by members of the university’s academic community. Through this platform, Missouri State’s intellectual output is accessible to an international audience.

How BearWorks Works

Thomas Peters
Tom Peters, Dean of the Libraries

The BearWorks system is managed by Missouri State Libraries, and it’s made possible by Libraries’ funding in addition to funds from the Office of the Provost and the Graduate College. You’ll find articles, theses and documents on BearWorks as well as archives of data sets, images and multimedia files. Tom Peters, dean of Missouri State Libraries, says the system receives heavy use from academics and researchers around the world, who download full texts of BearWorks items at a high rate. On the BearWorks landing page, you can check out an interactive world map that shows items being downloaded in real time.

Peters sees BearWorks as part of a cultural shift toward broader, more open access to a diverse range of sources. “As the Libraries and its users move into the second quarter of the 21st century, we’re all seeking and using locally created and curated content, in addition to the mainstream content from major publishers that we’ve always used,” he says. “BearWorks, along with other local digitization efforts, are key components of this broad program to focus on localized digital content.”

BearWorks by the Numbers

  • Almost 13,000 papers, theses and documents are housed in BearWorks.
  • Approximately 156,000 items are downloaded each year.
  • Currently, the most-downloaded document, “The Impact of Social Interaction on Student Learning,” by Dr. Beth Hurst, Dr. Randall R. Wallace and Dr. Sarah B. Nixon, has been downloaded 10,769 times.

Submit Items to BearWorks

Submitting scholarly works to BearWorks is a straightforward process.

  • For faculty: Send your preprints, postprints or other scholarly materials to BearWorks@MissouriState.edu.
  • For graduate students: Following approval by the Graduate College, submit your thesis directly to BearWorks according to instructions in the Brightspace thesis course.

Around Campus…

The Ozarks Studies Institute, an ongoing initiative of Missouri State Libraries, is well known in our region for preserving, documenting and promoting Ozarks culture. This summer, the Institute’s work got an even bigger platform — one of the highest-profile stages in the country: the National Mall. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival presented “The Ozarks: Faces and Facets of a Region,” a 10-day exploration and celebration of our region’s culture.

Tom Peters served as co-curator of the event, and it was made possible through a vast collaboration. State funding, in-kind donations and student contributions all played roles in bringing this comprehensive look at Ozarks culture to Washington, D.C. Participants and presenters from Missouri State were on site, taking photos, interviewing attendees and recording performances and craft demonstrations.

Sabrina Lynn Motley, the festival’s director, shared the following on-site attendance figures and social media data for the event.

  • In-person attendance for the event reached 626,851.
  • Across various social media platforms, there were 2,230,264 impressions related to festival content. Some of the most popular posts featured Ozarks expert Dr. Brooks Blevins, professor of history.

Relive the Experience

Much of the festival’s content is available to enjoy online, including this headlining concert from the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.