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.
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.
In our series of posts highlighting 10 years of the Digital Repository Service (DRS), I wanted to shine a light on the audio and video materials we host that engage with global warming, pollution, and the climate emergency.
Student Research
The annual Research, Innovation, and Scholarship Expo (RISE) is an opportunity for students and faculty to showcase their research focused on solutions to real-life problems. In 2021, these presentations were recorded.
The debt calculator: a gratitude-based approach to environmental justice by Kira Mok and Sophie Kelly describes how Chelsea and East Boston have a higher burden of pollution and negative health consequences compared to more wealthy parts of Boston, which benefit from industry in these neighborhoods. Their project “What Does Chelsea Do for You?” led to an infographic and online quiz about the debt Boston residents owe to these areas.
Northeastern University green chemistry education symposium, a presentation by Olivia Sterns, Umin Jalloh, Christopher Mahir, Christina McConney, and Angelica Fiuza, describes a sustainable and environmentally responsible chemistry curriculum and plans for a related conference. You can also check out the organization Beyond Benign.
The impact of biological knowledge on pro-environmental behavior is a presentation by Kyleigh Watson, Kelly Marchese, Jasmine Ho, and Daniela Ras that explores the relationship between study participants’ knowledge of nature, urbanicity, and implicit and explicit connection to the natural world.
Podcast Episodes
The What’s New podcast, hosted by Dean of the Library Dan Cohen, is one of the most popular collections in the DRS. It consists of wide-ranging conversations with faculty members across the university.
How We Respond to Disaster (season 1, episode 1) — Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of the Global Resilience Institute Stephen Flynn talks about how communities come together in the wake of disasters, including increasingly common extreme weather events.
Ethics and the Environment (season 3, episode 13) — Director of the Ethics Institute Ron Sandler discusses climate change and how we can ethically respond to the moment.
The DRS team also works with professors to host student coursework in the repository.
The course Gender, Race, and Medicine (WMNS 1225), taught by Moya Bailey, included the creation of a podcast series. In the episode How Boston Institutions Impact the Health of Neighborhoods: Tufts Medical Center and Northeastern University, Celene Chen and Paulina Demirev discuss a variety of issues surrounding gentrification, including the fight against a parking garage in Chinatown that would likely have led to increased pollution. Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections holds the records of the Chinese Progressive Association, one of the groups that protested against the garage.
These selections demonstrate how the DRS documents both the climate crisis and the innovation solutions emerging from Northeastern’s academic community.
If you’ve seen pictures of campus happenings, then you’ve seen the hard work of the Northeastern University photographers. This team is responsible for documenting the day-to-day activity that takes place on Northeastern’s campuses, capturing everything from sporting events to researcher portraits to candid photos of students going about their day.
Matthew Modoono, Alyssa Stone, and many other photographers in the Communications Office have used their cameras to document life at Northeastern for decades. They have been recognized by the University Photographers Association of America, the National Press Photographers Association, and the New England Newspaper & Press Association, and have received several awards, including Picture of the Year and Photographer of the Year, for their tremendous skill and vision in the field of photography.
Library staff are responsible for archiving the printed photographs captured through 2010 (digitized copies are also available in the Northeastern University photograph collection (A103). Since 2010, we also help facilitate access to their digital collection in the Digital Repository Service’s Communications Photo Archive (access to the photographs in this collection are limited to Northeastern faculty and staff).
The Communications Photo Archive has served as a record of recent activity since 2015, when the Digital Repository Service first launched. Since then, the photographs stored in the collection (more than 172,000 at the time of this writing) have been viewed and downloaded approximately 400,000 times. The photographs can be seen in many places around the university, including websites, printed brochures, magazines, social media, and in the daily articles published in Northeastern Global News.
A screenshot of an NGN article that features a photograph stored in the DRS, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20533071
Photographs in the collection capture:
General shots of Northeastern community life, usually titled “campus feature” (including a wide variety from Snell Library!)
Students celebrate at the 2025 undergraduate commencement ceremony held at Fenway Park, https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20740045. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University.
Photographs of commencement make up a large portion of the collections, with about 20% of the 172,000 photos described using the terms “graduation” or “commencement.” In fact, some of the busiest days for uploading photographs to the DRS happen during the commencement season, with photographers regularly adding more than 1,000 photographs a day.
Although the photographs in this collection are only available to Northeastern faculty and staff, the collection regularly appears in the list of the top 10 most-used collections in the DRS — a testament to how important the photos are to the day-to-day work at the university.
Be sure to check the Communications Photo Archives regularly for the most recent photos of life at the university. You can sort search results by “Recently created” or “Recently updated” to view the most current shots. You may also click the “Recently added” button to sort the entire collection by the most recently uploaded images. The “Limit your search” button can be used to limit your results by the name of the photographer or the year the photograph was taken.
Contact me or my team for help using the DRS or finding photographs in the collection. Visit the Brand Center’s Photography page for information about the photographs and photographers, as well as how you can access the photographs and use them for university business.
And please enjoy some of my favorite photographs from the Communications Photo Archive: animals on the Boston campus!
https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20732128, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20236444, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20467241, Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20452354, Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20444529, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20411840, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20325749, Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20252465, Photo by Adam Glanzman.
During the 2024-25 academic year, the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections (NUASC) scanned 24,608 pages of archival materials for both in-person and remote researchers. This output has allowed NUASC to serve more researchers and broaden access to these primary sources by uploading them into the Digital Repository Service (DRS).
A photo from the National Center of Afro-American Artists records
Work to put these reference scans into the DRS began in 2023 with a backlog of scans from NUASC’s remote reference program. Archives staff understood the research value of readily available scans and wanted to make them more accessible to anyone, regardless of institutional affiliation or research goals. Uploading these files into the DRS was a collaborative effort between Metadata and Digital Projects Supervisor Drew Facklam, Reference and Outreach Archivist Molly Brown, and Reference and Reproductions Archivist Grace Millet.
Once a workflow was developed to clean up and provide information about the files, collections were identified based on community and researcher needs, as well as the quantity of scans. As of June 2025, 14,226 pages of digitized materials have been ingested into the DRS. Reference scans have come from the:
Reference scans are completed at a lower resolution than scans used for publication, though they are still entirely legible and usable for research purposes. Another important difference between reference scans and other digitized materials in the DRS is the format of reference scans’ titles, which allow users a glimpse into the inner workings of archival organization.
The titles of these files contain the collection number, box number, folder number, and folder title.
With this knowledge, anyone viewing these files can discern where they are located within NUASC’s collections. This allows for easy reference if a researcher might need to request a higher-quality scan of a specific item.
To learn more about what is available in the Digital Repository Service from NUASC, you can search our digitized collections or reach out to us at archives@northeastern.edu. The public services team is looking forward to continuing this expansion of access to collections stewarded by NUASC!
