Cardinal Scholar Selected as Name for Ball State University Institutional Repository

Cardinal Scholar is the name selected for Ball State University’s Institutional Repository, a utility designed for housing and making accessible digital materials created by students and faculty.

'Cardinal' is taken from the University’s athletic teams, which are part of the NCAA Mid-American Conference. 'Scholar' is chosen to convey the scholarly nature of the works that will be made available to members of the University community through this new digital resource.

The vision for Cardinal Scholar is to:
· Provide access to scholarly works produced at Ball State University
· Promote Ball State University’s intellectual capital to a worldwide audience
· Advance open scholarly communication

Cardinal Scholar will serve as an accessible digital archive by providing a user-friendly mechanism for uploading new materials, providing Internet access to the uploaded materials, and making them searchable. It will support a variety of formats, provide for varying levels of access, e.g. access restricted by group, depending on user needs, and it will ensure long-term preservation of scholarly works.

Formats of materials posted to Cardinal Scholar may include Access, Adobe Flash, CSV, Excel, JPG, Microsoft Word, MP3, PDF, Powerpoint, TIFF, TXT, WMA, WMV, among others.

Watch for Cardinal Scholar to be added to the University Libraries’ Digital Commons on the Libraries’ homepage in the coming months, www.bsu.edu/library.