EIU Media Relations

EIU's Digital Archive, The Keep, Reaches Major Milestone

(Charleston, IL) -- Eastern Illinois University's Booth Library is proud to announce a milestone in the preservation and sharing of the creative and scholarly work of Eastern Illinois University. The Keep, EIU’s digital archive, has just posted its 100,000th object.

The historic 100,000th object, posted on December 12, 2023, is a photograph from the investiture ceremony of EIU President Jay Gatrell. The photograph captures a significant moment in the University's history, and through serendipity represents a historic accomplishment for The Keep. The 100,000 entry can be viewed at https://thekeep.eiu.edu/gatrell_investiture/39/. The image was created by Jay Grabiec, the university photographer, who has contributed a remarkable collection of over 1,300 entries to The Keep.

The Keep is the EIU institutional repository, a digital archive of faculty scholarship, student and professional journals, graduate theses, undergraduate honors papers, EIU historical documents, committee documents and more. The mission of The Keep is to digitize, preserve and promote the scholarly and creative output of EIU, optimizing the content for easy online discovery.

Todd Bruns, Head of Scholarly Communications, shared appreciation of hitting this milestone.

"I am beyond thrilled that we have passed the milestone of 100,000 works posted in The Keep, making our institutional repository one of the largest in the State of Illinois. Since we launched The Keep in the fall of 2010, the content has been wildly popular with over 5.5 million downloads to over 235 countries and over 57,500 institutions from Greenland to New Zealand."

"As we move into the second decade of The Keep, I’m excited to see the growth of our repository increase exponentially as we transition to empowering faculty, staff, and students to directly and easily add their content to the platform," Bruns added. "Additionally, Library Services will soon be providing new digital scholarship tool with a Digital Exhibit platform and a Research portal, a research information management system. These combined resources will tell the story of EIU as a research institution, digitally archiving and preserving institution, digitally archiving and preserving EIU history, student life, academic scholarship, events, and more for the benefit of current and future scholars. This milestone achievement is one that truly belongs to all of us.”

For further details about The Keep and Booth Library, please visit https://thekeep.eiu.edu/.This milestone achievement is a demonstration of the collective efforts of the entire EIU community.