Invited talk, given at the first inaugural Innovation Summit: Libraries & Innovative Learning Environments, September 2023, Cal Poly Humboldt, Arcata, CA.  PDXScholar, the campus repository for Portland State University, showcases three Featured Collections: Climate Justice, Racial and Gender Equity, and COVID-19. These collections lift up the humanities, include a bounty of AV materials, and have become quite popular. Climate Justice is one of the top ten collections; the Equity collection has over two million downloads; works in the COVID-19 collection have been downloaded over one hundred thousand times by users in two hundred plus countries.

In this presentation, I will discuss the significance of the Featured Collections, how we are facilitating collaboration and helping to elucidate complex problems like climate change, systemic racism, and public health challenges, and how these collections have laid the groundwork for the latest cross-disciplinary collection, Student Work: an Open Showcase of Outstanding Student-Created Research & Creative Work.

Showcasing this work is effectively changing the scholarly record by promoting underrepresented voices, the voices of faculty, staff, and students who are future-focused, who hope to see other possible futures, who look to the past to try to change the future. Re-envisioning alternative futures might solve a myriad of complex problems facing global communities.

Academic libraries and educators, as stewards of scholarly output, have the opportunity and the responsibility to boost content that creates transformative, iterative learning opportunities and to change the scholarly record, but, more importantly, to change our world for the better.