WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Patricia Shields, Nandhini Rangarajan, and Lewis Stewart
Under the NASPAA accreditation standards adopted in 2009, MPA
programs should incorporate “public service values” in their mission and
should show how they intend to “advance knowledge, research and practice of
public affairs, administration and policy” (www.naspaa.org/accreditation/NS/
naspaastandards.asp). Quality capstone papers that are widely distributed and
used can help a program achieve this objective.
Further, universities across the nation are using new technologies (open access
digital repositories) to “capture the scholarly output of an institution and to
maximize the research impact of this output” (Chan, 2004, p. 1). This research
output is a type of public good, which in state-funded institutions has been
subsidized by taxpayers. With few exceptions, and with the permission of the
author, the scholarly productivity of a university’s master’s and doctoral students
is a public good that should be shared widely with the public. Allan Scherlen
and Matthew Robinson (2008) go so far as to claim social justice is enhanced by
dissemination of criminal justice scholarship via open access modalities. Further,
when the content of these scholarly works is widely available through an open
access digital repository, the institution’s name and work are promoted.
University libraries that host open access institutional repositories are
adding dissertations, master’s theses, capstone papers, and honors theses to their
inventory. They have found that student work of this kind can enhance the
reputation of an institution and contribute useful knowledge to the state, nation,
and world (Lynch & Lippincott, 2005). One way to measure the reach of a
university’s digital repository is through full-text downloads.
In 2005, Texas State University librarians approached their MPA Program to
see if the program would be willing to have its capstone papers (Applied Research
Projects) included among the first set of student papers to be part of the new
Texas State University open access digital repository. 1 The library approached the
MPA Program because librarians were aware of the national and regional awards
received by MPA Program Applied Research Projects (ARPs), the MPA Program
already had an inventory of ARPs in digital form, and Applied Research Projects
had been part of the library collection for about 15 years. The MPA Program
agreed, and the first ARPs were uploaded to the digital commons in January
2006 (see http://ecommons.txstate.edu/arp/). Both the library and program were
interested in the papers being used as much as possible. Since January 2006, the
Texas State MPA Program capstone papers have been downloaded over 325,000
times from 140 countries.
This article explains the role and purpose of open access digital repositories
as they apply generally and to MPA program student work specifically. Using
download data, characteristics of the papers, and search engine optimizers, we
examine the factors that contribute to the high capstone paper downloads at
Texas State University. The Journal of Public Affairs Education has a tradition
of examining the role of capstone projects (see, for example, Brown &
158 Journal of Public Affairs Education