On Tuesday, September 30, 2025, the University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship reached a new milestone by depositing the 50,000th item into IU Indianapolis’s institutional repository, ScholarWorks. ScholarWorks was first launched in 2003 as a way to encourage open access sharing of works written by campus scholars. Since its creation, the repository has steadily grown into one of the largest institutional repositories in the state of Indiana. Works included in ScholarWorks range from theses and dissertations, articles published in peer-reviewed journals, educational resources, student made research posters, and more.
The 50,000th item deposited into ScholarWorks is a report created by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy in collaboration with the Bank of America regarding charitable giving. This report was authored by Jon Bergdoll, Adriene Kalugyer, and Phuong Tran Nguyen. The Center for Digital Scholarship reached out to the three Lilly Family School of Philanthropy authors for their thoughts on their project and their reaction to having contributed to this exciting milestone.
Can you briefly explain what the report on charitable giving by affluent households aims to achieve, and how you came into a partnership with Bank of America to conduct this research?
We’ve had a partnership with the Bank of America for 20 years. We release the Bank of America Study of Philanthropy every two years. The study allows us not only an opportunity to look closely at the philanthropic habits of the affluent but serves as a place to regularly ask detailed questions about philanthropic motivations, other forms of altruism like volunteering or crowdfunding, and other related topics that may receive more limited attention in other surveys.
The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy is one of the most active schools at IU Indianapolis when it comes to depositing research into ScholarWorks. How has participating in open scholarship impacted the work the School of Philanthropy does?
Depositing research into ScholarWorks allows us to have our research available in one location. We have the ability to load full research studies which we know will be archived and accessible in the future. We also place a link to ScholarWorks on our website, social media, press releases, etc. so those who want to see the full report have easy access to it.
Why did your team decide to share your work on IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks?
Research can’t help anyone if no one sees it. ScholarWorks gives us the means to easily, publicly share our work in a user-friendly way. It also helps assure that, one year from now, five years from now, the URLs are all still active, that the work is still available, something which is easy to take for granted until you try to dig through old citations. – Jon Bergdoll
There are many niche areas of specialties that support specific populations of people that need it most. ScholarWorks provides a space for research to educate donors, practitioners, and academics about the philanthropic sector. Our research is meant to spark questions and even collaboration within the philanthropic sector and beyond. We hope to fulfill the gaps in knowledge about the sector and areas of support to increase awareness and understanding of nonprofit organizations and their desired missions. – Phuong Tran Nguyen
While hitting the 50,000th item milestone is of course an exciting event for the Center for Digital Scholarship, the Center’s team has no plans to slow down when it comes to promoting open access of work done by IU Indianapolis’s scholars. With the campus’s recent elevation to R1 status, which is sure to increase IU Indianapolis’s research output, there will be plenty more achievements in open knowledge to celebrate in the future.