Skip to Main Content

University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Site Navigation Menu

IDEALS

This guide has information on how to deposit and access IDEALS materials for individuals and collection administrators.

Depositing into IDEALS

All faculty, staff, and graduate students can deposit into IDEALS.

The benefits to depositing in IDEALS include:

  1. Dissemination: IDEALS provides high visibility and increased access to your research. The descriptive information about your deposited works will be made available to Google and  Google Scholar, and other services. 
  2. Increased Impact and Citation of Your Research: Some studies have shown that research and scholarship openly available on the web have increased impact and higher citations than research and scholarship that is not. A bibliography of studies is available on the impact of open access.
  3. Persistence: IDEALS provides persistent, permanent URLs to your digital research.
  4. Full text searching: In many cases IDEALS provides full text searching of your research.
  5. Preservation: IDEALS makes a commitment to preserve your digital content for long term access and use.
  6. Control: When you deposit into IDEALS, you retain your copyright. Even if the work has already been published, many publishers will allow you to deposit your work into institutional repositories.
  7. Download Statistics: We offer download statistics for each item. We weed out web crawlers, mass downloaders, and other bots as much as possible, so that these downloads reflect 'real' downloads.

These are benefits to you as an individual scholar. In addition, IDEALS provides the University of Illinois with the infrastructure to collect, preserve, and manage access to this important part of the University's scholarly record, thus continuing the long term tradition of libraries and archives.

These pages will help guide you through the deposit process:

For more information, see the IDEALS policies.