Andrea Schuler, Digital Collections Librarian and Ashley Peterson, fine arts Research & Instruction Librarian began working together in July 2016 on an initiative to include visual art thesis projects in the Tufts University institutional repository. This project, now in its third year, has resulted in the addition of dozens of visual arts theses into the repository, where they are available alongside senior honors theses from across disciplines in the Schools of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. In this presentation, Schuler & Peterson will outline their initial research into best practices and case studies regarding artwork-as-scholarship in IRs, describe their pilot project, and summarize subsequent improvements and future directions. They will focus on the affective labor of this initiative, describing how they attempt to foster student engagement, achieve faculty buy-in, and navigate a project with multiple, cross-departmental institutional stakeholders. They will also speak to the technical challenges of representing artwork in a platform designed for text files. More broadly, the presentation will highlight opportunities to engage undergraduate students in the larger scholarly conversation and to introduce concepts of open access, copyright, and licensing in a real-world situation. The project offers a low-resource model for creating access to new types of material and empowers student artists to contextualize their work within the larger body of an institution’s scholarly output, while working within the limits of a repository designed for more “traditional” scholarship. After the presentation, in addition to questions, audience members will be encouraged to share examples of related work or unmet needs at their own institutions in order to broaden the conversation
