USD Research, Engage and Design (RED), an online data repository, was created over two years ago. RED allows worldwide sharing of scholarly and creative works created by USD faculty, students and institutional partners.
RED is a service of the University of South Dakota University Libraries. Daniel Daily, dean of libraries, said the vision for RED was to show off all of the good works done at USD — which highlight a broad range of disciplines and thinking.
“RED is fairly new so not all of the schools, colleges and departments have work in there,” Daily said. “RED represents a lot of the school of medicine because that was one of the first groups of faculty and researchers that started putting materials in there.”
Any USD student, graduate or faculty member is welcome to add materials to RED. Daily said the materials that are found on RED really took off due to the relationships that already existed among the university’s librarians, faculty and students.
RED is a working group, Danielle Loftus, manager of RED, said. She said it isn’t just a single group of people contributing to RED, it is USD as a whole.
“RED is open access, so it’s something that, traditionally, faculty will put their work in there,” Loftus said, “Both graduates and undergraduates are able to upload their work.”
Loftus said there are a lot of works from the fine arts department as well as honors theses.
“RED is for intellectual output,” Loftus said. “Any kind of article, video, scholarly research, data, working papers, technical documents and more can be added.”
It may be difficult for undergraduate and graduate students to find publication opportunities, Loftus said, so RED provides them the opportunity to publish information they wouldn’t be able to distribute elsewhere.
“It’s been great for the honors program because the students are able to publish their honors thesis and have it available worldwide,” Loftus said.
Students applying to graduate school can use RED as a place to view potential graduate schools and for their honors thesis. Admission committees are able to look at the honor theses there, Daily said. RED also allows employers to see the work one has done as an undergraduate.
The primary focus of RED is to allow access to undergraduate student work, Daily said, particularly with the honors program and undergraduate research program here at USD.
“RED will really kind of grow itself, we help people upload stuff in there but for the most part it really is self-service,” Daily said.