The #ResearchSpotlights social media campaign for Knowledge Commons has been ongoing since April 2023. Since then, many hands have taken up mining the KC repository, KCWorks, to share the exciting and varying works that people worldwide add to it. Many of these hands have been graduate students within the English department at Michigan State University, just like me.
Working for the Knowledge Commons has been a fun and exciting experience. I started in August 2024, and from the beginning, I was excited to explore the repository to find interesting works to feature in the social media spotlights. Due to my research background as a graduate student, mining KCWorks was like second nature to me, and continuing the #ResearchSpotlights campaign has been a task I’ve come to love on days when my poor graduate brain can’t pay attention to academic responsibilities.
Before you see them on our social media, the creation of the spotlights begins with deciding on a monthly theme. I gather inspiration from academic fields, subfields, and national or international holidays that may interest our audience before heading to KCWorks. Usually, the theme connected to more deposits is the monthly winner! I then organize all the selected deposits in an Excel sheet to keep a monthly archive. The Excel sheet also functions as a calendar and metadata holder that I can easily access while creating the spotlights. Because our posts are designed to help our users expand their reach, the Excel sheet also enables us to track the level of engagement each deposit receives. Every month, I revisit previous Excel sheets to calculate how many times our users’ work has been downloaded after being featured, and it’s always exciting to see the numbers increase. After publishing our posts, we strive to find and tag our users, so they can also share their work with their circles!
Our #ResearchSpotlights are released every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 am ET. This month, our theme will be Pride Month.
Make sure to follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn to see our #ResearchSpotlights and let us know what themes we should consider next.
If you are interested in proposing a topic for our research spotlights, you can use this anonymous survey link!