About TRACE

Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange (TRACE) is The University of Tennessee’s public access digital repository. Created and maintained by the University of Tennessee (UT) Libraries, TRACE is a venue and archive for Volunteers’ research and creative works as part of the Libraries’ mission to provide “expertise and leadership in accessing, creating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge."

TRACE contains scholarly works by UT faculty, staff, and graduate students, as well as documents from institutional archives. The content available in TRACE spans journal articles, technical reports and data sets to theses and dissertations, conference papers, presentations, book chapters, and other scholarly materials. TRACE also contains selected faculty-approved undergraduate student work.

TRACE Vision

TRACE acquires, organizes, preserves, and provides access to the intellectual capital that makes Tennessee a leader in research and teaching. The academic community is creating more and more new knowledge in digital form.

Digital content enables wide dissemination. Tools such as word processing software, e-mail, blogs, digital cameras, and scanners contribute to a growing body of digital resources with intrinsic value to the researcher.

Researchers draw on content from hard-to-find sources, such as technical reports, grant proposals, conference proceedings, and personal communications, as well as on scholarly work published in journals and books.

TRACE brings together in one place work produced by the UT community to make the content easily accessible. These services highlight UT's prominence in advancing knowledge and help fulfill The University of Tennessee’s mission to enrich and elevate citizens of the state, nation, and world.

TRACE Goals

  1. Collect digital content in a variety of formats through submission by content creators.
  2. Organize and catalog content to make it discoverable.
  3. Preserve content to assure digital file stability, long-term usage, and security.

View additional benefits and policies of TRACE, and feel free to reach out to the UT Scholars Collaborative with questions.


About VOL Journals

VOL stands for Volunteer, Open-Access, Library-hosted Journals. VOL Journals represent partnerships between the University of Tennessee (UT) University Libraries and journals or conference proceedings published, edited, and/or founded by researchers and scholars affiliated with UT.

How does a VOL Journals partnership work?

The Scholars’ Collaborative in the UT Libraries provides expertise and services to support journal publishers. We provide a platform for journal publishing, mint DOIs, offer guidance on journal indexing, lead consultations related to best practices in journal publishing as outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics, and partner with editors and publishers in numerous other ways. VOL Journals is not a publisher, but partners with publishers to improve their visibility and sustain their operations.

Who can use VOL Journals?

Anyone with Internet access can read or access VOL Journals because each journal is an open access publication. Any researcher or scholar affiliated with UT who wants to start (or transfer) a journal should schedule a consultation with members of the Scholars’ Collaborative in the UT Libraries.

To learn more about the UT Libraries VOL Journal hosting service, visit TRACE User Support.


About UT Datasets

TRACE showcases and provides the infrastructure for UT scholars and researchers to display, share, and archive datasets according to standards and best practices for interoperability of digital libraries. Researchers may also post data management plans for research projects and to link to data sets featuring UTK scholarship. TRACE is available for authors to post data management plans for research projects and to link to data sets featuring UTK scholarship.

Learn more about research data management, or if you have a dataset to archive in TRACE, complete this README file and reach out to Data Curation Librarian Christopher Eaker for next steps.