Digital repositories are widely used as a mechanism for making scholarly works freely accessible on the web. Academic libraries are often involved in the creation and management of institutional repositories that focus on preserving and disseminating the scholarship produced by their institution’s faculty and students. This can include article pre-prints and manuscripts, technical reports, conference proceedings, data sets, and software, as well as theses and dissertations. For many libraries, ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) are the first targets for an institutional repository program, and represent an opportunity to engage graduate students and their faculty advisors in broader conversation about open access, intellectual property management, long-term management of digital content, and other scholarly communication issues. Institutional repositories are especially important for universities with open access policies that direct faculty to deposit final manuscripts of scholarly articles into repository. They are further useful in helping researchers comply with funder mandates on the accessibility of research data. Libraries are also instrumental in creating repositories for the purpose of digitizing, preserving, and showcasing cultural heritage collections.
Disciplinary repositories, such as arXiv (physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computer science, quantitative biology) perform the same sorts of services as institutional repositories, but for scholars within particular disciplines or groups of disciplines. Finally, grant funding agencies, such as federal agencies, create and maintain their own repositories to preserve and disseminate the research they support. These repositories include not only scholarly articles but also the data produced and compiled in the process of the funded research.
Supported by Berkeley Electronic Press, this series of webinars on institutional repositories is based on the presentations at the ALCTS 2009 Midwinter Symposium.
The sessions have included a brief history of institutional repositories, key benefits and possible obstacles to a successful IR implementation, and a discussion of the future of the institutional repository within the larger context of the rapidly changing scholarly communication landscape.
Making Institutional Repositories Work by
Quickly following what many expected to be a wholesale revolution in library practices, institutional repositories encountered unforeseen problems and a surprising lack of impact. Clunky or cumbersome interfaces, lack of perceived value and use by scholars, fear of copyright infringement, and the like tended to dampen excitement and adoption.This collection of essays, arranged in five thematic sections, is intended to take the pulse of institutional repositories--to see how they have matured and what can be expected from them, as well as introduce what may be the future role of the institutional repository.Making Institutional Repositories Work takes novices as well as seasoned practitioners through the practical and conceptual steps necessary to develop a functioning institutional repository, customized to the needs and culture of the home institution. The first section covers all aspects of system platforms, including hosted and open-source options, big data capabilities and integration, and issues related to discoverability. The second section addresses policy issues, from the basics to open-source and deposit mandates. The third section focuses on recruiting and even creating content. Authors in this section will address the ways that different disciplines tend to have different motivations for deposit, as well as the various ways that institutional repositories can serve as publishing platforms. The fourth section covers assessment and success measures for all involved--librarians, deans, and administrators. The theory and practice of traditional metrics, alt metrics, and peer review receive chapter-length treatment. The fifth section provides case studies that include a boots-on-the-ground perspective of issues raised in the first four sections. By noting trends and potentialities, this final section, authored by Executive Director of SPARC Heather Joseph, makes future predictions and helps managers position institutional repositories to be responsive change and even shape the evolution of scholarly communication.
Starting, Strengthening, and Managing Institutional Repositories by
From planning to promoting and everything in between, this new How-To-Do-It Manual fills the need for a book focused on managing your institutional repository (IR). The author covers every aspect of IR development in detail, and the book's clear adn logical organization makes it valuable as a cover-to-cover read or for consulting as a reference. Following an in-depth look into IR uses, benefits, and management practices, there is start-to-finish guidance covering: the librarian's role in IR implementation; planning, budgeting, and staffing; commercial and open source platforms; policy writing; marketing techniques; collection development and expansion; and use and assessment. An experience IR coordinator himself, Nabe also includes real-life examples of IR development from respected academic libraries, including Cornell University, Colorado State University, and Macalester College. Each one offers expert advice and best practices that you can replicate in your own project.
DSpace - an open source software package that provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is also commonly used as the basis for an institutional repository. It supports a wide variety of data, including books, theses, 3D digital scans of objects, photographs, film, video, research data sets, and other forms of content. The data is arranged as community collections of items, which bundle bitstreams together.
DSpace is also intended as a platform for digital preservation activities. Since its release in 2002, as a product of the HP-MIT Alliance, it has been installed and is in production at over 240 institutions around the globe[2] from large universities to small higher education colleges, cultural organizations, and research centers. It is shared under a BSD license, which enables users to customize or extend the software as needed.
EPrints - an open source software package for building open access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It shares many of the features commonly seen in Document Management systems, but is primarily used for institutional repositories and scientific journals. EPrints has been developed at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science and released under a GPL license (GNU General Public License).
Bepress is another major hosted repository platform. This hosted service is licensed by the Berkeley Electronic Press (Bepress is taken as its abbreviation). It is used by associations, consortia, universities and colleges to preserve and showcase their scholarly output. Digital Commons is one of their products.
Institutional repository. (2018, March 3). New World Encyclopedia, . Retrieved 13:03, July 11, 2018 from http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Institutional_repository&oldid=1009477.
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