The Northeastern University Library is excited to announce its third annual Reading Challenge! For each month of 2026, library staff have selected a theme. If you read a book that first the monthly theme and then fill out a quick survey about what you read, you’ll be entered in a prize drawing. We’re giving away prizes every month, so you have 12 chances to win!
How to Participate
Step 1: Read a book that first the theme. Need inspiration? Check out Libby for on-theme audiobooks and e-books, or visit Snell Library during one of our monthly tabling events to browse selections from our print collection and pick up Reading Challenge bookmarks and stickers.
Step 2: Tell us what you read. Every month, we’ll draw one winning name from the list of readers who have completed our book survey
The Themes
The 2026 themes are:
January: A book about exploration, travel, or a journey February: A book under 200 pages March: A book written in letters or diary entries April: A book recommended by a librarian May: A book with a non-human protagonist June: A book about activism July: A book about American history August: A book by an author local to your Northeastern campus September: A book set on a college campus October: A book of investigative journalism November: A book about food December: A book published in 2026
The Prizes
The prizes vary monthly and include:
Northeastern University merch
Stocked study rooms and finals week care packages
Library posters featuring our own Paws the Husky
Stay Up to Date
Want to stay in the loop on the Reading Challenge? You can sign up for our newsletter to receive monthly book recommendations. Make sure you’re also following the Library News blog and our social media accounts (@NortheasternLib on Instagram, Twitter/X, and Bluesky) to find out the winner each month, and keep an eye on the library calendar to find out when we’ll be hosting events!
The Digital Repository Service (DRS) is a dynamic place that showcases the variety of projects and scholarly work completed by members of the Northeastern community. Every year, new material is added to the DRS, including theses and dissertations, datasets, presentations, photographs, archival collections, and more. To conclude our series of blog posts celebrating 10 years of the DRS, I thought it would be fun to look back at this past year.
First, some statistics! In 2025…
75,851 new files were added to the DRS. There are 516,254 files total.
1,567 new users signed onto the DRS.
1,557,614 interactions (views, downloads, and streams) occurred.
Next, I wanted to put a spotlight on some work completed this past year. This blog post focuses on projects related to Digital Production Services (DPS), the department I’m a part of.1 DPS is responsible for the day-to-day management and upkeep of the DRS.2 Our work this year involved collaborating with different groups, departments, and people across the university, adding new collections and files to the DRS and completing metadata updates to existing collections, among other things.
Collaboration across the university…
Mills College Art Museum (MCAM): Collection images and exhibition catalogs from the museum were added to the DRS. MCAM, located in Oakland, was founded in 1925 and its collections include over 12,000 objects. Highlights include Californian and Asian ceramics and important works by prominent women artists. To learn more about the museum, visit their website.
Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ): Cataloging work continued this year, and new items were added. This project showcases collaboration between many different people at Northeastern, including the School of Law, Archives and Special Collections, the Digital Scholarship Group, and DPS. To learn more about the work of the CRRJ, visit their website. Read more about this work in blog posts written by Archives Assistants Stephanie Bennett Rahmat and Annie Ross.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs): Every year, new theses and dissertations showcasing the breadth and depth of scholarship at Northeastern are added to the DRS. In 2025, 577 were added. To break this down by college:
Work related to the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections…
An example of a tear sheet from the Larry Katz Collection: a newspaper article written by Katz from the Boston Herald about Mariah Carey. https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20775370
Urban Confrontation (Office of Education Resources at the Communications Center) and Issue and Inquiry (Division of Instructional Communications): Two radio programs were added to the DRS. Both programs originally aired on Northeastern’s WRBB and highlight public affairs issues and other challenges facing Americans in 1970-71. To read more about this work, check out this blog post by Chelsea McNeil, a former metadata assistant.
Larry Katz Tear Sheets: Tear sheets (documents that provide proof of publication) were added to the Larry Katz Collection. In this case, the Katz tear sheets are the newspaper articles or clippings Katz wrote for The Real Paper and the Boston Herald. Katz’ interviews were previously added to the DRS. With the addition of the tear sheets, new connections can be made between the interviews and articles.
Freedom House: New items were added to the Desegregation and Education sub-series of the collection. If you’re interested in learning more about community activism, busing, and desegregation in Boston Public Schools and efforts to provide all children with equal access to educational opportunities, this sub-series is a great starting place.
Boston Gay Men’s Chorus (BGMC): New audio and video recordings (mainly of performances) by the BGMC were added. A portion of the college is holiday concerts, and though we’re past the holiday season, I can’t help but recommend listening to some holiday music (or put this on your to-do list for later this year!). Here’s a link to “Home for the Holidays,” the 2001 holiday concert. To learn more about the BGMC, visit their website.
The Cauldron: New editions of Northeastern’s yearbook were added. The Cauldron was first published in 1917 and is also available to browse through the Internet Archive.
Reference scans: Archives and Special Collections (NUASC) scanned over 46,000 pages of material for researchers this past year. These scans are now being incrementally added to collections with minimal metadata to make NUASC’s records more accessible. To learn more about this work, read Grace Millet’s blog post. So far, 8,584 pages have been added to NUASC’s DRS collections for:
I wanted to wrap up this post by previewing the collections, projects, and collaborations for the DRS in 2026.
Work has started on the digitization and description of collections related to Elma Lewis, founder of the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts (1950), the National Center of Afro-American Artists (1968), and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (1969). Through these institutions, she shaped and influenced Black art, artists, and performers in Boston and beyond. This work is made possible by a Community Preservation Art grant from the City of Boston. To learn more about this work, read the blog post written by Giordana Mecagni, Head of NUASC, and Molly Brown, Reference and Outreach Librarian.
Metadata updates are currently in progress for the WFNX Collection, which mainly consists of clips and episodes from The Sandbox, a beloved morning radio program that aired on WFNX, a radio station broadcasting in the Greater Boston area from 1982-2012. These updates are expected to be completed early this year.
Planning has begun for DRS v2. There are many improvements planned for behind the scenes and changes that will impact how users interact with the DRS. We’re excited to get the ball rolling and sharing more about this work in the future.
It’s an amazing accomplishment to reach 10 years, and a testament to the passion and dedication of the Northeastern community. We look forward to the next 10 years, which will bring new challenges, collections, opportunities, and collaborations.3
If you’re interested in depositing your materials to the DRS, or working or collaborating with DPS, please email library-DPS@northeastern.edu — we’d love to hear from you! To read more about DPS services, visit our departmental directory.
Footnotes:
There are so many different communities, groups, and people that work on and contribute to the DRS. This blog post is only able to capture a snapshot of all that goes on.↩︎
Many library staff members work alongside DPS to support the DRS. To learn more about the people behind the DRS and the DRS itself, read What is the DRS and who is it for? by Sarah Sweeney, Head of Digital Production Services.↩︎
A big thank you to my colleagues in DPS (Sarah Sweeney, Drew Facklam, and Kim Kennedy) and NUASC (Molly Brown) for their help and feedback, which contributed greatly to this post.↩︎
This etching on paper by Italian draughtsman and printmaker Stefano della Bella is likely to have been one of the works that brought the DRS to its 500,000th upload.
This milestone comes as the library celebrates a decade of supporting the DRS as a service for the university community. In those 10 years, a few files have emerged as the most popular, seeing consistent traffic year after year, including:
This “Ancient Aliens” meme from the One Marathon collection is the most viewed file in the DRS.
Internet Meme: “Ancient Aliens” meme — The most viewed file in the DRS is a variation of the Ancient Aliens meme from the Our Marathon collection, which contains crowdsourced images, documents, and audio-visual content related to the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon. The file has been viewed 51,598 times since 2018, averaging more than 7,000 views a year.
Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS): Full Test — The most streamed audio or video file in the DRS is a test instrument that is widely used in the field of psychology. The full test video has been streamed 21,979 since 2015, averaging more than 2,000 streams a year.
In September, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections (NUASC) hosted the staff of The Huntington News for an open house to view campus collections dating back from 1926-2009. This event was held in part to help The Huntington News staff prepare to celebrate their centennial year in February 2026 and to introduce the past news issues at their disposal for future research.
The Huntington News has recently been leveraging the archives in their reporting, with archival records featured in many stories. Their From the Archives series chronicles important events and eras in the university’s past with support from primary source materials such as documents and photographs.
Photo courtesy of Margot Murphy/Huntington News
NUASC is fortunate to steward multiple student news publications, including Northeastern News (and its predecessor, The Northeastern Tech); Panga Nyeusi, Northeastern’s first Black student newspaper; and the Black student-run Onyx Informer. Many of these materials can be accessed online through the Digital Repository Service.
While flipping through old issues of Northeastern News, Huntington News staff members were able to see the marked differences between the various eras of the News. While older issues featured more text, shifts in reporting and design led to more photographs in later editions. They were also able to compare reporting from the present to similar themes in the past, such as on-campus demonstrations and rapidly developing new technologies.
Photo courtesy of Margot Murphy/Huntington News
Staff members were welcome to use the microfilm reader that is housed in the reading room to view News issues. While there is a material difference between scrolling through microfilm and leafing through a newspaper, there are benefits to both methods of researching past issues. Microfilm provides quick access to specific issues and a compact way of storing information from print resources. Physical news issues give researchers the opportunity to engage with an item in the same way that someone would have when the issue was first printed.
Student news has been a vital part of the Northeastern campus community since its inception in the early 20th century. These publications are available in physical form and can be viewed in the NUASC reading room. If you would like to view these or any materials in the archives, please make an appointment by contacting archives@northeastern.edu.
A fundraising opportunity to digitize the news is coming soon and will be announced in the new year. NUASC is excited to collaborate with The Huntington News to expand access to these historic records.
Northeastern’s electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) provide a valuable record of the university’s scholarly contributions, capturing the evolution of research across numerous academic disciplines over the past two decades. The Digital Repository Service (DRS) preserves all ETDs from 2008 onward, along with selected earlier works, creating a collection of more than 7,500 items spanning over 30 departments and nearly 70 academic programs.
As some of the DRS’ most frequently accessed materials, ETDs offer rich insights into the university’s academic history and digital presence. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the DRS, Digital Production Services (DPS) — the department responsible for managing both the DRS and ETDs — set out to share insights into how theses and dissertations are added to the repository and how Northeastern’s ETD collections have evolved over time.
ETD Creation to DRS Ingest: Process Overview
The ETDs are initially submitted to ProQuest by graduate students as a condition of their graduation. The rules for the submission package and document organization are determined by each program. Once the submission is completed and the student fills out information about their ETD, the file and metadata are sent in via a zip file to a library server. Over the last 5+ years, a local workflow has been developed to:
Export the files and move backups to other networked drives
Record submissions in a spreadsheet to ensure file provenance
Document any additional information, such as embargo dates or original file names, in case there are issues with the submission
Review, normalize, and transform the existing ProQuest metadata to create DRS-compliant records for each file
Add degree, school, and department information to each record to support the DRS collection structure
Ingest the ETDs into their corresponding collections in the DRS
Generate digital object identifiers (DOIs) for each ETD
Conduct name authority control on all advisor and committee member names
Filtering options for ETDs in the DRS.
New ETDs are processed and ingested every 2-3 months, depending on the time of year and the volume of ETD submissions, and can involve anywhere from 30 to 100 ETDs at a time. DOIs are generated and ETD contributor names are reviewed bi-annually.
General Growth
The total number of ETDs submitted by Northeastern students has increased significantly since 2008. From 2008-2010, there was an average of around 190 documents submitted annually. As the 2010s continued, that number steadily increased from 353 in 2013 to 583 in 2019. There was a small dip in 2020, possibly due to COVID interrupting degree completions, but since then, there have been approximately 540-590 ETDs submitted each year.
Degree Distribution
Almost 90% of ETDs produced from 2008-2010 were either for Ph.D. or MS degrees, but as the School of Education started producing theses for the Ed.D. degree, those quickly became common, and represented 34% of all ETDs produced by 2020. Additional degree programs also started producing ETDs from 2010-2020, with MA, DLP, and MFA degrees representing almost 5% of ETDs during that period. In the last 4-5 years, numbers have stabilized, with Ph.D. dissertations regularly accounting for around 45% of all ETDs, Ed.D. theses around 35%, MS theses hovering around 15%, and all other degree types filling out the remaining 5%.
Data visualization showing ETD submissions by degree type from 2008-2014. Created by Claude (Antropic) based on analysis of dataset exported from the DRS and transformed by the author. Generated May 2025.
College, School, Department, and Program Representation
Data visualization showing ETD submission by college from 2008-2024. Created by Claude (Anthropic) based on analysis exported from the DRS and transformed by the author. Generated May 2025.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (910)
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (705)
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (316)
Department of Art + Design (271)
Computer Science Program (245)
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (242)
School of Pharmacy (212)
Department of Chemical Engineering (209)
Department of Counseling and Applied Educational Psychology (202)
Addition of Supplementary Files
The first ETD to include supplemental files, or files submitted to accompany the ETD PDF file, first appeared in 2013. The number of supplemental files grew throughout the 2010s, with supplemental material representing 4% of all ETD file submissions during that time. Since 2020, the number of supplemental files has seen a slight decline, but there are still regular submissions, with 26 provided in 2024. The college that most often submits these files is the College of Arts, Media, and Design (CAMD), with almost 1 in 4 theses including supplemental materials.
Other notable contributors include COE and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH). The smallest contributor is CPS, which, despite being the largest contributor of ETDs overall, has only 11 total supplemental files since 2013.
Screenshot of a supplementary file page that features a photograph stored in the DRS. Original photo by Hannah M. Groudas.
New Undergraduate Theses
More recently, undergraduate programs from departments like Biology, Biochemistry, Marine and Environmental Science, and Psychology have begun to submit electronic theses directly to DPS staff. DPS offers the same level of service to the undergraduate theses as the graduate ETDs and includes the same metadata in each accompanying description to ensure these materials are as discoverable as the graduate theses and dissertations.
Maintaining ETDs is a vital part of the DRS’ mission, presenting unique challenges that library staff are well-equipped to manage. As the submission processes, file formats, academic disciplines, and research topics continue to evolve, the library remains committed to preserving and providing access to these scholarly works. Through ongoing innovation and stewardship, we ensure that the academic contributions and history of Northeastern students are securely archived and shared for generations to come.
AI acknowledgement: Claude Projects was used to generate data visualizations based on ETD metadata exported from the DRS and transformed into a spreadsheet dataset. Specific visualizations based on identified columns were requested. Project instructions, prompts, and dataset are available here.
