Paul Royster, coordinator for scholarly communication, completes his 19-year career at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries with a Lifetime Achievement Award from Elsevier Digital Commons for work on behalf of the faculty and students in the growth of the University’s institutional repository (IR) and his innovations that have shaped the development of the platform.
According to Ann Connolly, director of product at Elsevier Digital Commons, Royster was the first person to receive the lifetime achievement award in recognition of his career building and sharing Nebraska’s online research collections in its repository and his impact on shaping the vision and direction of repository initiatives.
“Paul [Royster] has spent a lifetime dedicated to advancing research and knowledge, first in the world of book publishing and university presses, and then as a repository administrator publishing everything from faculty pre-prints to Tractor Test reports to the hundreds of works by ornithologist Paul Johnsgard,” said Connolly, “The repository Paul manages has the most downloads in the Digital Commons community and possibly across all repositories in the world, topping more than 90 million.”
Royster has been working on Nebraska U’s Digital Commons since 2005, which received a lot of support from the Dean of Libraries, Joan Giesecke, from the start. Royster was given one charge – to fill the repository. Over the years he met with departmental chairs, faculty, librarians, and lectured numerous times to recruit the content of open access copies of papers, books, book chapters and other learning objects to the IR.
“The mission of the Digital Commons is to collect the local resources of the research output of the University of Nebraska’s faculty, staff, and students and share them with the world,” explained Royster.
He made it convenient for current and retired faculty to work with him. Encouraging faculty to send in their vita and he and his colleagues would do the rest.
Royster’s hard work paid off because in 2023, NU’s Digital Commons is the third largest installation with 129,000 items, after University of California system and University of Michigan, but number one in experiencing the most traffic and downloads at 91 million to date.
Royster who retires in January of 2024 is proud of his legacy distributing Nebraska’s research from “pole to pole” helping the university to build its international reputation.
“We’ve broadcast UNL-branded research to a global audience reaching some of the most remote places on earth,” Royster said.
During retirement Royster looks forward to taking time to work on his own publications and adding them to the Digital Commons under the leadership of his colleague, Sue Gardner, Scholarly Communications Librarian.
Gardner says that working with Royster has been a highlight of her career.
“We have had a ton of fun helping our colleagues communicate with each other and people around the world,” explained Gardner, “I really knew that this program that he built was on the right track when a colleague told me that while doing field work in the Colombian jungle he ran into a Colombian field researcher there who immediately recognized Nebraska. He said, ‘Oh, yeah, I know that place — it’s the university with the Digital Commons.’”
