Cornerstone celebrates its 1st Year with over 50,000 downloads!

Today, Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works celebrates its first anniversary!  Launched by Library Services on June 17, 2014, Cornerstone showcases the intellectual output of Minnesota State University, Mankato’s faculty, staff and students by preserving their works digitally and presenting them to the world in an easy-to-find format.  

The first two collections in Cornerstone consisted of over 350 electronic theses and dissertations from the College of Graduate Studies and Research and 14 volumes (186 individual articles) of the Journal of Undergraduate Research, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed, online journal of undergraduate research.  Now, one year later, Cornerstone contains 1,898 items ranging from articles by faculty members to proceedings of the Undergraduate Research Symposium to a set of aerial photographs of the Greater Mankato area from 1959 and 1967. 

Download counts for Cornerstone have exceed expectations.  Items in Cornerstone have been downloaded over 50,000 times within the past year.  Two of the most popular items are student works.  "An Exploratory Study of a User’s Facebook Security and Privacy Settings" by graduate student Brandon Hoffmann, a thesis for a Master of Science in Computer Information Science, tops the list with over 1,018 downloads since it was added to Cornerstone on June 18, 2014.  "Herd Immunity and the Necessity of Vaccinations: Modeling the Effects of MMR Vaccinations," a 2010 submission to the Journal of Undergraduate Research by students Caitlyn Cardetti, Katie Groskreutz, and Melissa Zins also comes in high on the list with 715 downloads.  Over 134 other items in Cornerstone have download counts over 100 and that number is growing each day. 

Additionally, many of the items in Cornerstone are found in the Digital Commons’ Network, a collection of over 1.3 million free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and college worldwide.  When our items are downloaded or made popular by the number of views, our University is ranked each month on various subject disciplines in the Commons.  With the exception of June and April, we have been ranked in the top 10 each month since June 2014 for many disciplines in the Commons.  Most recently, we had a number 2 ranking in the Ethnic Studies Commons.  In the past, we have been ranked number 1 in the Gerontology Commons, the Maternal and Child Health Commons, Forensic Science and Technology. 

Items in Cornerstone not only reach a local audience but a global one.  One of the newest features in Cornerstone is the Readership Map found on the bottom of the main Cornerstone page.  The Readership Map places a pin point on a world map to show the location of a reader and the item that they downloaded for a particular day.  People from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Germany, Malaysia, the Philippines and many more have downloaded and viewed our works.   Here is an example of the map from today.  

Do you have a work that you would like to submit to Cornerstone?  Do you have an idea for a digital project that you would like to do?  Interested in learning more about Cornerstone?  Contact Heidi Southworth, Digital Initiatives Librarian at heidi.southworth@mnsu.edu or 507-389-5066.   

Help us grow Cornerstone by submitting your works today! 

Visit Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works at: http://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/

Additional information on Cornerstone can be found at: http://libguides.mnsu.edu/cornerstone

Heidi Southworth is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Comment below with suggestions and any questions!