Research on veterans and military-connected families matters most when practitioners, funders, and policymakers can find it and use it. Syracuse University’s D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) built the Voices of Service showcase around that idea, and the second annual event drew 62 presentations to Syracuse University’s National Veterans Resource Center on April 9th, 2026.

The IVMF contributed 10 presentations in the Voices of Service showcase from its own research and evaluation, community insights and impact, and digital library teams. Much of that work explores how veterans and military families are asked to navigate isolated systems never designed to operate together, and how stronger data, stronger coordination, and easier access to research can reduce how many people slip between the cracks.

This installment covers the IVMF Digital Library.

The IVMF Digital Library Was Built to Solve a Findability Problem

A veteran preparing to open a business, an employer building a military hiring program, and a county service officer deciding where to send a client all need the same thing: actionable research they can trust. That research exists, but is dispersed across academic journals, university repositories, federal reports, and nonprofit white papers, much of it free, but hidden. Sorting which material is current and which is outdated, which studies are credible, and figuring out what a given report means takes hours, longer for those not trained to extract information from studies.

The IVMF brought that problem to Syracuse University Libraries in early 2020. There was a desire for a single portal combining IVMF research with carefully selected outside resources, to create an all-in-one repository for research related to veterans and their families. The closest solution in use at the time was a repurposed content management system, which had limited success. However, Syracuse University library staff was already in the process of migrating to a platform built for digital archiving, and by late 2021 the team recognized it could carry the IVMF project as well. Once modeled, the library was able to publish in just four months.

Scott Warren, then Associate Dean of Research Excellence at Syracuse University Libraries, described the 2022 launch as the result of thousands of hours spent developing metadata, curating collections, and ensuring accessibility. Librarians carefully select what enters the IVMF Digital Library, and that judgment is what separates it from the glut of less helpful results someone might get from a simple search engine.

Two Systems, Two Jobs

Syracuse University already had a home for open access scholarship before the Digital Library existed. SURFACE, the university’s institutional repository, stores research created at Syracuse and provides stable long-term preservation, persistent access, Digital Object Identifiers on request, and centralized download statistics that show researchers where their work travels.

The Digital Library builds on that foundation with a layer of judgment. It applies metadata, search filters, and curated context, shaped around the questions veterans, military families, employers, and service providers have. This makes it easier to filter the search and get to what matters rather than browsing through everything the repository holds.

Referral data from SURFACE suggests the arrangement is working well. The IVMF website and the Digital Library rank first and third among the top sources sending readers to IVMF research in the repository, ahead of Google Scholar.

What the Library Holds

Four years on, the library organizes its material into four curated collections alongside an index of IVMF-authored publications covering applied and translational research, program evaluation, and data solutions. Each collection applies the same standard to a different body of material.

The research is also grouped into collections, such as:

• The Employing Veteran and Military Family Talent Collection delivers the insights, tools, research, and data that inform military-connected employment initiatives and policies, made possible with support from USAA.
• The Center of Excellence for Veteran Entrepreneurship Resource Library offers original and curated content for anyone interested in veteran and military-connected business ownership, made possible with support from Fiserv.
• The Coordinated Care Research and Practice Collection brings together IVMF publications and curated material on how communities support and serve veterans, service members, and their families.
• The Syracuse University Research Collection covers research conducted across the university about, by, and for veterans and military-connected individuals.

Each collection includes datasets, briefs, journal articles, conference papers, working papers, presentations, panels, testimonials, and even video and audio recordings. Everything is free to use and open access. April 2026 marked four years since the library launched as a partnership between the IVMF, Syracuse University Libraries, and the School of Information Studies, and it continues to mature into a unique, helpful resource to the military-connected audience that just didn’t exist a few short years ago.

Building a Collection

Two presentations at Voices of Service 2026 showed that careful curation in progress. The first built directly on a poster from the year before. At Voices of Service 2025, Grace Swinnerton and Dylan Mohr presented how SURFACE and the Digital Library together could enhance the impact and longevity of veteran-focused research at Syracuse. That work laid the groundwork for the SU Research Collection, which launched that fall. In 2026, Kamryn Lenning of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies and Swinnerton reported on how that collection was assembled. Swinnerton and Calypso Doran of the IVMF Digital Library also hosted a table where attendees searched the collections alongside the librarians who maintain them.

The assembly work began in SURFACE. Keyword searches on military, veteran, and army returned 123 potential items for review.

Each of those items then went through the Digital Library’s Collection Development Policy, the framework that governs how the collections grow. The policy prioritizes items that are credible, relevant to the library’s users, and supportive of the IVMF mission, and its public summary poses eight questions to every candidate resource covering credibility, accessibility, enduring value, and long-term sustainability.

The IVMF advances its mission through actionable research, and that standard carried weight during selection. Items that were not current, or that fell outside the library’s scope, were dropped. Historical research and research on non-U.S. militaries were removed. Both categories remain preserved in SURFACE for scholars who need them, but the Digital Library collects for readers making decisions in the present.

What remains is still a broad range of material, calling into question how a reader might navigate it all. The team examined the remaining items to identify significant themes, then established topics based on how frequently subjects appeared, which research areas the IVMF already covers, and what information users were likely to need. The 11 topics they ended up with were Social and Behavioral Science, Health and Wellness, Higher Education, Law and Legal Services, Library Services, Policy, Support Services and Advocacy, Campus Activities, Entrepreneurship, Transition, and Military Families. These categories help further reduce result noise, making it easier for users to find exactly what they need.

Judgment Continues After Selection

Digital Library staff and IVMF research experts review current holdings periodically to confirm they remain relevant, usable, and timely. Material that has been superseded, that has lost contemporary value, or that no longer resolves to a working link comes out. The library also accepts recommendations. Anyone who knows of a resource that belongs in a collection can email divmflibrary@syr.edu with the subject line Recommendation for the Digital Library, and staff evaluate that suggestion against the same standards applied to everything already held.

The veteran, the employer, and the service officer interested in accessing research on veterans and their families can find actionable data to drive decision-making at divmflibrary.syr.edu.