Last Updated on December 10, 2025, 11:01 am ET
CreateFSU, the FSU-branded instance of Reclaim Hosting’s web-hosting service, was launched by Florida State University (FSU) Libraries in 2021 to provide faculty, staff, and students with a platform to showcase digital projects. The program aims to enhance opportunities for digital scholarship and position the library as a key resource for, and investor in, research dissemination across the university. The program reflects the library’s recognition that the growth of digital scholarship requires not only access to tools but also institutional commitment to providing and managing the infrastructure necessary to sustain those projects.
The CreateFSU program emerged in response to faculty and student feedback about the lack of accessible infrastructure to share digital projects. Research projects, interactive exhibits, archives, and web-based pedagogical platforms do not always meet the criteria for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) site-hosting services through FSU Information Technology Services (ITS). By providing an alternative web-hosting service supported by the library, we were able to offer researchers a customizable interface that allows them to retain control over the development and administration of their sites. This also allows for greater flexibility of purpose and autonomy in research projects and output.
As of December 2023, midway through the three-year pilot phase, CreateFSU recorded 106 total domains across 99 users, with faculty making up the majority of the user demographics. As of October 2025, CreateFSU has 151 total domains with 138 users, showing a 43% increase in domains and a 39% increase in users. Out of 131 requests, 60% came from faculty for individual or collaborative research projects. FSU staff make up 20% of the total requests, while students make up an additional 19% and postdoc scholars make up the remainder. Library and ITS staff also direct patrons to our service when they are looking for support with a digital project.
CreateFSU is constructed as a DIY service to allow for creativity in project design, offering installation of over 150 applications. Despite the flexibility of the service, all users agree to our terms of service, which outline appropriate use cases and remind users that they take full responsibility for their content. All sites must abide by copyright restrictions, academic integrity standards, information security and privacy policies, and conduct guidelines established by the university. Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS) library staff monitor sites and reserve the right to remove any that violate our terms of service. We are currently developing accessibility policies and training to help users meet federal requirements. We also provide a consultation service aimed at offering guidance and troubleshooting issues for users to support the development of their sites. However, the goal of the service is to offer FSU researchers ownership over their own digital output.
The variety of use cases for CreateFSU is a testament to the flexibility of the service. A significant portion of the projects are public websites for research dissemination and visualization. Some of them function as supplements to dissertation or thesis projects.
Silvia Valisa, associate professor of Italian studies, combined CreateFSU with the University Libraries’ Digital Repository to provide access and context to the digitized archive of the 19th-century Italian newspaper, Il secolo, founded by Edoardo Sonzogno. While CreateFSU is not directly integrated into the repository, some sites leverage the capacity of the repository to host and organize data, while providing framing and context through their CreateFSU site.
The program also promotes collaboration between faculty and students and offers pedagogical tools that augment instruction with practical, hands-on training. Michael Neal, associate professor in the English Department, uses CreateFSU to host a digital archive of over 6,000 historic postcards, stereo cards, first day issue stamps, and other related artifacts. The archive provides a digital preservation service and aims to support access for research projects. The archive is also a pedagogical tool, providing undergraduate and graduate students the chance to work in a digital archive and gain experience with archival practices and processes. Faculty also use the program to showcase cross-institutional research initiatives, such as Linking Women’s Pedagogy, a repository for tracing the reach of women’s pedagogical work in Rhetorical Studies.
Initially funded at the discretion of the dean of FSU Libraries, the program is currently searching for sustainable long-term funding. As we review the impact of the service after the pilot phase, DRS staff are conducting a systematic review of our service along with similar services across multiple universities and have scheduled maintenance for spring 2026. During this period, staff will enhance support documentation and available templates to increase usability for beginner users and provide consultations and guidance to current users whose projects have stalled. We will also be reviewing our use cases with the goal to focus on quality growth, supporting fewer projects but allocating our resources and time to helping those projects become sustainable and impactful displays of digital scholarship.
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of ARL Research & Analytics Impact Reports, which capture transformative effects of specific research library programs on students, researchers, communities, and/or the higher education/research enterprise. For more information about the Impact Reports series, contact Kevin Borden, senior director, Research and Analytics, ARL.
