Publications and Research
Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
12-5-2025
Abstract
In the ten years since its inception, the CUNY Academic Works repository has grown to house and provide public access to more than 33,000 scholarly, pedagogical, and creative works by affiliates of the City University of New York, the largest urban public university in the United States. Representing all 26 CUNY campuses — community colleges, four-year colleges, and graduate/professional schools, with legacies as old as 1847 (The City College of New York) and as young as 2018 (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies) — CUNY Academic Works has flourished thanks in large part to a system that combines central administration with local expertise.
CUNY’s Office of Library Services handles the central administration, which includes standardizing practices, developing documentation, and fielding a steady stream of platform and policy questions, while campus-based repository administrators perform outreach tailored to their campus communities, build relationships with authors and offices, review submissions to their local collections, etc. This model is easy to explain but difficult to enact: It requires a hierarchy of well-defined repository roles, an approach to policy that’s both flexible and firm, a culture of information-sharing, an appreciation that most repository administrators have only a few hours (if even that!) to devote to the repository each week, and a sense of humor about surprising problems and strong personalities. In our presentation, we will share the story of building and maintaining CUNY Academic Works — both the repository itself and the associated infrastructure of people, policies, and services — to benefit the whole university community.
