Research materials from the Learnability Project are now freely available through IUScholarWorks, Indiana University’s institutional repository. IU Professor Emerita of Speech and Hearing Judith A. Gierut, founder of the Learnability Project, initially intended to use IUScholarWorks to preserve research data from the project in order to meet the NIH data-sharing requirements. But she discovered that IUScholarWorks could do much more for her. All told, IUScholarWorks offers IU faculty, students, and staff the ability to collectively share and preserve all types of research materials, including, but not limited to, journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, technical reports, and data.
“After browsing other communities in the repository, I began to see the broader far-reaching potential of IUScholarWorks. Our collections will be accessible, maintained and preserved in perpetuity by the IU Libraries. This has distinct advantages over a personal website because we are ensured that our research will live on in historical documentation of the state of science.” In total, the Learnability Project collections in IUScholarWorks contain 70+ items, including working papers, datasets, and previously published articles, all of which may be accessed at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/20061.
The Learnability Project operated as an experimental clinical research program for preschoolers with speech sound disorders from 1985-2015 through funding from the National Institutes of Health. Professor Gierut admitted that the task of archiving the results of 30 years of research was daunting, but “the level of support and infrastructure provided by the IU Libraries was amazing. We were paired with Shayna Pekala, Scholarly Communication Librarian, who advised and educated us about the nuances of digital preservation. She met with us on numerous occasions in our lab and saw the development of our collections to completion. I was so impressed with the library services and the repository that I’ve encouraged my colleagues to start building their collections now.”
Are you an IU faculty member with digital research materials you would like to share and preserve through IUScholarWorks? Contact iusw@indiana.edu today!