Maryland Shared Open Access Repository

MD-SOAR is a shared digital repository platform for twelve colleges and universities in Maryland. It is currently funded by the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) Library Consortium (usmai.org) and other participating partner institutions. MD-SOAR is jointly governed by all participating libraries, who have agreed to share policies and practices that are necessary and appropriate for the shared platform. Within this broad framework, each library provides customized repository services and collections that meet local institutional needs. Please follow the links below to learn more about each library's repository services and collections.

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Recent Submissions

THE INDIGENOUS CULTURAL LANDSCAPE: EXPLORING A COMMUNITY-CENTERED APPROACH TO HERITAGE PRESERVATION IN THE UNITED STATES
(2026-01) Larson, Flynn; Bradley, Betsy; MA in Historic Preservation
Preservation becomes meaningful only when it honors the ongoing relationships that connect communities to their cultural landscapes. Cultural landscapes hold memory, knowledge, and belonging, yet preservation in the United States has long relied on frameworks that separate people from place and privilege tangible form over relationships. These systems shape what counts as heritage and whose stories are recognized. This thesis argues that centering relational worldviews, rooted in continuity, reciprocity, and responsibility, offers a path to transform preservation into a practice that reflects the living significance of place. This study positions the Indigenous Cultural Landscape (ICL) framework as a practical and ethical model for reorienting preservation toward place-based stewardship. The framework expands, rather than replaces, existing tools and provides a structure that practitioners can apply to landscapes to strengthen relationships between communities and the lands they call home. It moves preservation from compliance to care, from procedure to partnership, from documentation to relationship. Indigenous voices—of elders, scholars, and community advocates—whose teachings and lived experiences redefine what preservation can mean. Their perspectives form the foundation of this study. Drawing from Indigenous scholarship, community narratives, and public discourse, I demonstrate how this thinking parallels work undertaken both in the United States and internationally. If we can rehabilitate, restore, and reconstruct the physical fabric of places, we can also restore the ethics of the discipline itself by aligning practice with equity, accountability, and relationship. The Indigenous Cultural Landscape framework builds upon earlier models by advancing a community-first approach that prioritizes Indigenous worldviews of continuity, stewardship, and relationship over Western notions of access and ownership. I acknowledge the dedication of those trying to reconcile the existing authorized heritage discourse in these systems with the values they aim to protect, as I address how documentation processes identify landscapes but rarely reflect their living significance, and management structures still separate consultation from collaboration. I recognize the progress already made while offering a clear guide and rationale for why and how we must continue. Ultimately, I aim to bridge commitment and action, aligning federal intent with community leadership and providing practitioners with a framework that links ethics, process, and practice. I apply the Indigenous Cultural Landscape framework to Bear Lodge, also known as Devils Tower National Monument, to demonstrate how Indigenous and federal perspectives on stewardship converge and how relationship-based preservation can emerge from that dialogue. Comparative examples from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand further illustrate how relational worldviews can be integrated into national heritage systems. In a broader sense, this treatise contributes to theory by integrating Indigenous epistemologies and lived experience into preservation discourse. It contributes to practice by providing a framework for agencies, including the National Park Service, to embed relational worldviews into documentation and management. It aligns with former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s Secretarial Order 3403 (2021) and the Department of the Interior’s Guidance on Indigenous Knowledge (2022), which affirm the federal responsibility to support Indigenous sovereignty, dignity, and traditional land use. I recognize that preservation must operate as a relational act of reciprocity that sustains communities and landscapes. The Indigenous Cultural Landscape framework transforms preservation from a record of the past into a living dialogue of care, sovereignty, and belonging.
Keeping the Bodegas, Banyas and Barbershops: A Toolkit For Creating, Growing, and Sustaining a Legacy Business Program to Preserve Cultural and Community Continuity
(2025-12-15) King, Ben; Lytle, Melanie; Farris, Lorin; Cardona, Luis; Humanities; MA in Historic Preservation
This framework document introduces the concept of legacy businesses and how to preserve them. Legacy businesses are the longstanding small businesses that help define, retain, and sustain their communities' cultural heritage. These businesses play an essential role in shaping neighborhood character, sense of place, and cultural continuity, especially in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), ethnic, and immigrant communities. Additionally, when these legacy businesses are displaced, the impacts are intensified, weakening community cohesion and harming residents' well-being. This makes them worthy targets for preservation. This document challenges the idea that market forces alone should determine whether these businesses continue. It outlines how speculative development, gentrification, limited access to capital, and barriers to business services or succession planning create structural pressures that disproportionately threaten legacy business owners and the communities they support. This framework document serves as the foundation for an online, freely accessible legacy business program toolkit. The toolkit is designed primarily for community organizers and nonprofits, with municipal governments and historic preservation professionals as a secondary audience. Drawing on first-hand experience, primary research, case studies, best practices, academic theory, and interdisciplinary resources, the toolkit provides a straightforward process and set of policy options for creating, building, and sustaining legacy business programs. This document also details the theories and current conversations in preservation practice that shaped the toolkit’s development. It positions the toolkit as a conduit for advancing more equitable, inclusive, and community-centered preservation approaches. Finally, the project argues that legacy business programs offer a means to expand preservation beyond the built environment, support more democratic practice, and sustain cultural continuity in communities.
Keeping the Bodegas, Banyas & Barbershops: A Toolkit for Creating, Growing, And Sustaining a Legacy Business Program to Preserve Cultural and Community Continuity | Thesis Project Document
King, Bennett; Lytle, Melanie; Farris, Lorin; Cardona, Luis; Humanities; MA in Historic Preservation
This thesis project document provides examples of content created for an online Legacy Business Program Toolkit intended to support the preservation of longstanding, culturally significant businesses that contribute to community identity and sense of place. It supports the thesis framework document of the same name. Legacy businesses represent an important yet often underrecognized form of living cultural heritage, particularly within BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), ethnic, and immigrant communities. In the absence of national or state-level guidance, the toolkit illustrates existing and emerging best practices from municipal and community-based legacy business programs nationwide and aligns them to a people-centered historic preservation framework that values both tangible and intangible cultural resources. This thesis project document includes the primary public website address for the toolkit, archived website links depicting the website at the time of submission, and representative screenshots illustrating the site’s organization and content. As both a preservation deliverable and a resource for others, this thesis project and corresponding website support wider conversations in historic preservation about equitable preservation, cultural sustainability, and the importance of protecting intangible cultural heritage alongside historic buildings.
Cooperative Heritage Communities: A Framework for Community-Led Preservation in Rural Black America
(2026-01-23) Johnson, Darius; Bradley, Betsy; Robert Forloney; Monica Rhodes; MA in Historic Preservation
Across the United States, African American communities are celebrated in heritage interpretation while simultaneously facing displacement, population decline, and institutional erosion. Preservation policy measures success through heritage tourism revenue, property values, and architectural integrity—metrics that rarely translate into community stability or descendant empowerment. This study argues that heritage preservation is incomplete without community survival and introduces Cooperative Heritage Communities (CHCs) as a framework for aligning cultural stewardship with community well-being. CHCs are not organizations to build or programs to fund—they are a mindset and practice grounded in principles of shared experience, collective ownership, democratic governance, community resource building, equity and justice orientation, and shared language and trust. Drawing on African American traditions of mutual aid, collective ownership, and democratic governance, the CHC framework guides communities in recognizing their existing heritage work as cooperative practice and provides tools to formalize, strengthen, and sustain it. Through this lens, communities can pool resources for cemetery restoration, stabilize family land through revolving funds, establish community-sanctioned development agreements, and build intergenerational preservation capacity by organizing what already exists around principles of cooperation and shared stewardship. This framework emerges from moral, structural, and policy challenges observed on Maryland's Eastern Shore, by the author—challenges that mirror national trends: rural Black population decline, fragile community institutions, uneven development pressures, heirs' property vulnerabilities, and preservation systems that privilege architectural significance while overlooking cultural and cooperative significance. Through PESTLE analysis of preservation's external forces, case studies of cooperative heritage practice, and a scenario-building exercise set in a rural Black settlement, this study demonstrates how cooperative economics and heritage communities of practice converge to create sustainable, justice-oriented preservation models. The study contributes a replicable framework grounded in theory and practice, offering preservationists, community organizers, and policymakers a pathway to reorient heritage work from extractive storytelling toward community-centered stewardship. In rural Black communities where land, memory, and belonging are inseparable, CHCs offer a way to ensure that preservation sustains not only sites and stories, but the people, places, and futures those sites represent. The study culminates in a scenario set in Butlertown, Maryland, demonstrating how CHC principles translate into practice through a community-governed revolving fund that prevents land loss and maintains cultural continuity. Future research should test CHC implementation across diverse geographic and cultural contexts while developing metrics that center community-defined measures of preservation success.
Does Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Improve Liver Outcomes in MASLD with Obstructive Sleep Apnea? A Systematic Review
(MDPI, 2026-12-27) Channapragada, Theja V.; Brenner, Clinton R.; Guruswamy, Keven; Katamreddy, Rewanth; Pandian, Alwyn T.; Pendala, Vyshnavi; Sam, Jaydon J.; Stine, Jonathan G.; Brenner, Michael J.; Pandian, Vinciya
Background/Objectives: Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) often coexists with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) due to overlapping metabolic risk factors. Whether continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) influences hepatic outcomes in MASLD remains uncertain. This systematic review, using updated criteria for MASLD, evaluated the effects of OSA treatment on liver and metabolic outcomes. Methods: PubMed, Web of Science, and CINAHL were searched for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies in adults with MASLD and OSA treated with CPAP, lifestyle interventions, pharmacotherapy, or surgery. Outcomes included liver stiffness, fat content, enzymes, fibrosis scores, HbA1c, lipids, and anthropometrics. Risk of bias was assessed with RoB 2 (RCTs) and ROBINS-I (non-randomized studies) and certainty of evidence with GRADE. Results: Eight studies (three RCTs, five observational; n = 1006; 73.5% male) met criteria. Studies evaluated CPAP for from 4 weeks to 3 years, with adherence ≥4 h/night in most. CPAP produced modest, inconsistent reductions in alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase, small improvements in HbA1c and triglycerides, and minimal changes in liver stiffness, steatosis, weight, or anthropometrics. No RCT demonstrated significant improvement in fibrosis or steatosis. Risk of bias was low in one RCT, “some concerns” in two, and moderate in observational studies; one study had serious confounding risk. Conclusions: CPAP may modestly improve liver enzymes and select metabolic parameters in MASLD with OSA, but evidence for salutary effects on steatosis, fibrosis, and body composition is limited. Level of evidence was low due to methodological limitations, heterogeneity, and imprecision. High-quality, longitudinal trials are needed.