Helping Our Graduate Students SOAR: Promoting Scholarship and Populating Our Institutional Repository

The author describes how a requirement that our graduate students deposit theses and dissertations into our institutional repository (SOAR) helped to build our online scholarship, educate and strengthen graduate students’ identities as scholars, and forge relationships with the library. Taking advantage of the synergy brought about by a new open access policy, a robust digital repository, and library staff committed to advancing accessible scholarly works, we developed ways to educate, encourage, and promote our newest scholars. Based upon our success thus far, we will develop workshops and tutorials that will be extended to junior faculty to advance their scholarly success.