About CommonKnowledge

CommonKnowledge is the home of the collected scholarship and creative works of Pacific University faculty, staff and students - and of their collaborators from around the world. These open collections, organized and made accessible by the Pacific University Libraries, demonstrate Pacific's commitment to the idea that shared information and academic collaboration are essential to the "progress of knowledge" in our global community.

Why CommonKnowledge?

The intellectual inquiry and creative expression of Pacific’s faculty, staff and students often result in work that has the potential to benefit people outside of the University. CommonKnowledge provides a way for members of the Pacific community to not only share with those within their disciplines but to also allow their work to be discovered and used in new and unanticipated ways.

CommonKnowledge also provides a consistent, long-term home for work created at Pacific University. By contributing their work to CommonKnowledge, students, faculty and staff can be assured that their documents and files will be preserved and be available in perpetuity (which is helpful when placing links to work on resumes, websites, etc.).

What can be put in CommonKnowledge?

Any type of file can be made accessible through CommonKnowledge: documents, audio files, video files, data sets, presentation slides, research posters, software code, etc.

Currently, CommonKnowledge has articles, monographs, book chapters, theses, dissertations, critically appraised papers, research posters, conference presentation slides, original research reports, photographs, capstone projects, essays, and archival transcriptions.

How do people outside of Pacific find work that is in CommonKnowledge?

CommonKnowledge is crawled by Google, so anyone searching Google is able to find content related to their search terms in CommonKnowledge. This means that people outside of Pacific don’t have to know that CommonKnowledge exists to discover the work within in it!