The Global Reach of UNI’s Community Engagement Activities

The Global Reach of UNI’s Community Engagement Activities The community engagement work of the UNI campus is gathered, preserved, and showcased in UNI ScholarWorks, the institutional repository. The Rod Library’s digital scholarship unit coordinates and maintains UNI ScholarWorks. The purpose of the repository is to collect, preserve, and make available the creative and scholarly output from the University of Northern Iowa. Early in the history of the institutional repository, a section on community engagement was developed and modeled after the Community Engagement section found in the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s repository, which highlighted its community engagement Carnegie classification. UNI also has received the community engagement Carnegie classification twice, once in 2006 and a second time in 2015. The Community Engagement section in UNI ScholarWorks has become even more important since community engagement is included in the University’s current 2017-2022 Strategic Plan as a supporting goal. There is a variety of collections located in UNI ScholarWorks’ Community Engagement section. There are fifteen collections located in this section. The collections range from Iowa Geographic Alliance and Tallgrass Prairie Center K-12 lesson plans and STORM project K-12 weather activities to oral histories from the Postville Project and the Latino Americans grant. Manuals are posted from the Tallgrass Prairie Center and the Iowa Waste Reduction Center. A section highlights UNI’s Service-Learning Institute including two books and the Moving Word project videos. Community engagement and service learning activities at UNI are archived and preserved in UNI ScholarWorks and showcased to the people of the Cedar Valley, State of Iowa, and the world. 652 works have been read by 923 institutions, reaching 122 countries, with over 7,611 global downloads. My objective in attending the Communication Engagement Celebration Day event is to promote the use of UNI ScholarWorks as a place to showcase and archive UNI community engagement projects.