About Collections

The Lehigh Preserve Repository contains tens of thousands of digital objects spanning centuries of creation and formats ranging from audio recordings to medieval manuscripts. Below is a breakdown of each featured collection and the type of content that they each contain.

Mission

Lehigh Preserve is a repository based on the principle of open access. Lehigh Preserve collects, describes, distributes and preserves the scholarly output of the faculty, students, staff, and programs at Lehigh University, as well as digital materials from Special Collections. Members of the Lehigh community interested in submitting materials should contact the Lehigh Preserve site administrator at preserve@lehigh.edu

Collection

Our collection includes:

  • Theses & dissertations
  • Rare books
  • Archival manuscripts and papers
  • Published faculty research
  • Technical reports, working papers, and conference publications
  • Research data sets
  • Student research
  • Administration records
  • Faculty records
  • Syllabi and instructional materials
  • University and departmental publications and historical material
  • Digital image and multimedia collections

Lehigh Preserve is managed by Lehigh Library & Technology Services (LTS). The Lehigh University Preserve Committee supports Lehigh University's mission to "advance learning through the integration of teaching, research, and service to others" by overseeing Lehigh Preserve and is responsible for setting and administering repository policies.

Digital Special Collection

Material in this collection is sourced from the Lehigh University Libraries Special Collections. This department has been actively digitizing its holdings since the early 2000s in order to make rare and unique materials available as broadly as possible. Sub-collections in this category are organized by physical format, conditions of creation, or the originally intended purpose of the material. 

Special Collections also includes the University Archive, which includes all historical material about Lehigh since its founding in 1865.

Lehigh Scholarship

Material in this collection is sourced from the research and publications output by the Lehigh academic community, including faculty, staff, and students. If a Lehigh author publishes scholarly material that is available as open access then LTS endeavors to include it here. Lehigh faculty, staff, and students are welcome to submit their own scholarly material for preservation and increased accessibility.

Theses and Dissertations

Material in this collection is sourced from the masters theses and doctoral dissertations that graduate students are required to produce in order to graduate. Lehigh graduate students began producing doctoral dissertations in 1934 and thousands have been published since. Undergraduate theses have been produced since Lehigh's first graduating class in 1869 and continue to be published by select departments today.

Research Data

Material in this collection is sourced from completed projects and studies conducted by Lehigh faculty. This data likely accompanies a published article and is made available to verify findings and results reproducible. Data may be in a variety of formats and will likely need to be downloaded in order to be viewed.