Scholarly Commons hits 1M downloads of hospitality research

A digital repository that provides free access to some of the most important research in the hospitality field has reached a major milestone: 1 million full-text downloads from users all over the world.

The Scholarly Commons features the work of faculty and researchers from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration (SHA) and is used by academics and practitioners.

“It’s a testament to the quality of scholarship being produced by the faculty and researchers at the School of Hotel Administration, and to the power of making that scholarship available, online, to anyone with internet access,” said Jim DelRosso, digital projects coordinator for Cornell University Library’s Hospitality, Labor and Management Library, which created and runs the Scholarly Commons.

The three-year-old repository contains around 1,500 documents, including works from 70 percent of SHA faculty and all publications from SHA’s centers and institutes. Its collections include articles written for scholarly journals such as the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, the entire run of the Cornell Real Estate Review, and reports from the Center for Hospitality Research and other SHA research centers.

The Scholarly Commons helps disseminate Cornell scholarship throughout the world and provides access to materials from beyond the university that are relevant to SHA’s scholarly communities. For instance, the repository includes a collection from the Cornell Institute for Hospitality Labor and Employment Relations, with current legal analysis from some of the field’s leading practitioners.

“The research being done in SHA is quite amazing, and it has been exciting for the library to partner with them to further disseminate it,” said Curtis Lyons, director of the Hospitality, Labor and Management Library.

The most-downloaded document in the Scholarly Commons is “Planning and Programming a Hotel,” by HVS Professor of Hotel Finance and Real Estate Jan deRoos, published as a chapter in the 2011 book “The Cornell School of Hotel Administration on Hospitality: Cutting Edge Thinking and Practice.” Each of the 10 most popular articles has been downloaded an average of 28,000 times.

Melanie Lefkowitz is staff writer, editor and social media coordinator for Cornell University Library.

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