One new tool VCU offers to support undergraduate research is a digital archive of student work. This service of VCU Libraries is free and open to all undergraduates and their faculty mentors.

The archive project was developed in partnership with VCU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and released in 2013 for end-of-semester research projects. That program supports research activities in many ways, including financial support for summer fellows and travel stipends for research. In addition, the annual Poster Symposium for Undergraduate Research and Creativity is growing: It had 288 undergraduate presenters in 2013. And, some 800 students participated in the annual spring semester VCU Student Research Week in 2013. It is expected that all posters presented in the 2014 symposium will be archived in the new repository.

Now, students have an easy way to showcase the work they create beyond the one-day poster presentation during Research Week. With this archive, students’ work will be preserved and accessible for the foreseeable future. The creators/authors retain the copyright of the work including but not limited to future publication. They simply grant VCU the right to publish their work online.

Students are invited to access the website where they can then create a profile that includes information related to their project including their name, major, name of their faculty mentor or principal investigator, an abstract of their research project, and a pdf. file of their poster. Visitors to the archive are able to browse by author name, subject, title, and issue date.  

• Visitors can access the Digital Archive of Undergraduate Research Posters 
• Undergraduate researchers can upload their posters

Upon acceptance of their poster files for inclusion at the annual VCU Poster Symposium for Undergraduate Research and Creativity in 2014, undergraduate researchers will be encouraged to upload their poster to the archive.