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

Sharing Student Research with the World
from the Texas State University experience, approximately 45% of these ARPs
have been written by practitioners of public administration who work for state
and local government in Texas. It may be reasonable to say that most of these
ARPs are methodical inquiries into problems encountered by practitioners at the
workplace. Hence a dynamic interplay of practitioner experience informs public
administration research, and rigorous research informs practitioner response to
administration/management problems.
From the perspective of public administration research, this paper has
implications for facilitating knowledge transfer and exchange through an easily
accessible digital repository of research papers. Because these papers (ARPs) are
available in full-text format and free of cost to anyone in the world, they offer
potential for facilitating instantaneous access and knowledge transfer. These
ARPs serve as exemplars/foundations for students and practitioners who wish to
undertake similar research projects.
This paper also raises important questions about the validity of search
engines as useful tools for academic research. Dreyfus (2009, pp. 12–13)
observes that many view the Internet and the hyperlinked Web it weaves “as
a way of freeing us from anonymous specialists organizing our databases and
deciding for us what is relevant to what.” Put differently, this type of digital
infrastructure curtails intellectual elitism and promotes intellectual democracy.
How is research in general and PA research in particular going to be affected by
this nontraditional approach to information storage and retrieval? What kind
of impact is the gradual elimination of “gatekeepers” of information going to
have on quantity, quality, preservation, and transmission of research? These
are questions that will transform the way we think about public availability of
scholarly communications. They have serious implications for publicly funded
research that comes with the expectation of being publicly available.
FOOTNOTES
1 Texas State library contracts with Berkeley Electronic Press (referred to hereafter as bepress)
to provide the technological architecture for their open access digital repository. For a list of
institutions served by bepress, see http://digitalcommons.bepress.com/institutions.html. To see
the features that characterize the infrastructure of the bepress institutional repository, see www.
bepress.com/ir/features.html. To see how download counts are calculated, see www.bepress.com/
download_counts.html.
2 We obtained circulation statistics for printed versions of MPA students’ Applied Research Projects
from 1978 to 2010. We found that they were checked out of the library a mere 1,411 times over a
22-year period.
3 Texas State University–San Marcos is located in Central Texas about 30 miles from Austin, the
capital of Texas. Texas State offers courses in the late afternoon and evening in three locations (San
Marcos, Austin, and Round Rock [north of Austin]). Approximately 45% of Texas State MPA
students work in or around Austin for the State of Texas. We draw these numbers from an extensive
database of current students and alumni maintained by the Texas State University MPA program.
Journal of Public Affairs Education 177