Of fifty-eight library and information science programs currently accredited by the American Library Association (ALA) in the United States and Canada, the University of Southern Mississippi’s School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) is one of only twenty offered completely online and is the only ALA-accredited program in the state. Part of the accreditation process includes maintaining contact and communication with students and alumni. This can be a difficult task to accomplish when faculty may never meet students in person and students are located all over the state, the United States, and the world. One idea to meet this accreditation requirement was to create an online newsletter; students and alumni would send in updates and would receive program updates. Fortunately, reaccreditation coincided with the university library’s introduction of The Aquila Digital Community (http://aquila.usm.edu/) hosted through Digital Commons. Once Aquila was in place and it became obvious that Digital Commons made it easy to do much more than newsletters, the focus moved to an open access journal called SLIS Connecting (Image 1). The new purpose became “to share news, information and research with future students, current students, alumni, faculty, and the general population through selected faculty publications, invited student publications, refereed publications, and through regular columns.”[1] The first issue was electronically published in February 2012 and the second in October 2012. The third issue was published in February 2013 and contains the first paper submitted from an author not affiliated with SLIS. SLIS Connecting, an electronic open-access journal hosted in a university depository, is currently indexed in Google Search and in Google Scholar.