Institutional Repositories
by Joshua Parker on Oct 03, 2008
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Julia Gross
Many institutions have found that while faculty are often enthusiastic about the prospect of establishing an institutional repository; actual participation in the form of contributing content to the repository is far more haphazard. While a variety of explanations have been offered for this, one of the most basic reasons is that researchers are focused on their work and communicating with colleagues, not on building a repository for their institution. In light of this realization, institutional repositories have begun exploring ways to boost participation.
Education of the faculty and other researchers about the goals of the repository and the benefits of making their work more freely available are, of course, crucial. But, in general, such efforts have not been sufficient, and we can expect to see increasing use of other outreach methods in the future.
One option is to work toward establishing policies that mandate the deposit of certain types of materials in the institutional repository, along the lines of the recent mandate adopted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard.
A second approach is to introduce a mediated deposit service in which librarians supply a range of services including digitization of paper items and individual copyright counseling. In such a system, librarians will also submit items on behalf of contributors in an attempt to lower the barrier to participation. The library where Wendy and I work is in the process of developing a repository now, and is attempting to address this by building procedures that will make contribution as easy as possible for researchers by taking responsibility for much of the “busy work” out of their hands.
Another likely area for future development is the creation of services that allow contributors and others to build a network for sharing learning materials and collaborating with colleagues at their institution. Such an approach would also help create a more meaningful context for some of the materials currently housed in institutional repositories that do not appear to hold immediate scholarly value.
Overall, it’s an exciting time to be working with institutional repositories, although there are serious challenges to be met. As more institutions establish them and improve techniques for both filling their repositories with quality scholarly content and helping researchers use the material in them, we can expect institutional repositories to play an increasingly important role in scholarly communication and in the intellectual life of our research institutions. 3 years ago Reply
The use of OAI-PMH compliant metadata makes it possible for the contents of institutional repositories to be discovered by researchers using any number of search interfaces.
Probably the most well known of these is OAIster, a service that allows users to search across more than a thousand contributing repositories. Similar capability is available through searching directories of institutional repositories like OpenDOAR. Repository content can also be found through specialized search engines like Scirus, or by using Google.
There a few challenges related to searching for material in institutional repositories, however. First, while the use of unqualified Dublin Core makes interoperability possible, it also limits the degree of precision one can use in a search. Another issue is the fact that institutional repositories contain all manner of documents, some of great scholarly value and some with minimal scholarly relevance. These issues likely underlie the somewhat disappointing levels of use by scholars, and are among the challenges that institutional repositories must struggle with in order to become truly successful. 3 years ago Reply
Let’s start at the beginning. A well-informed faculty member with a strong commitment to open access (thanks, no doubt, to her library’s persuasive information sessions) has just finished a paper, for example. When submitting it for publication in the journal of her choice she has taken care to amend the journal’s copyright transfer agreement to allow her to deposit a post-print copy of her article in her college’s repository.
After publication in the journal, she takes the post-print PDF of her paper (known in the terms of the OAIS model as a Submission Information Package), and deposits it in her college’s customized DSpace system by entering the required metadata and uploading the file.
Once the file is ingested into the system, a repository librarian reviews, verifies, and edits the item, and clears copyright and licensing issues or turns these questions back to the submitting faculty member. Metadata is added and the object is stored in the system in accordance with digital preservation standards. The Archival Information Package, as it is now called, is now searchable by community, date, title, author, and subject.
A few weeks later, when a colleague searching for our researcher’s paper queries the repository, either using the local interface or a harvester such as OAIster, the item is called up as a Dissemination Information Package and served up to them on their desktop. Surrounding and supporting this workflow are policies, procedures, services, and the technical infrastructure required to maintain this system. 3 years ago Reply
The concept of a community of users supporting the software was built into the system. DSpace actually integrates a user community into the system architecture, an approach none of the other platforms have taken. This allows for the various departments of a research institution to participate in a way that is customizable to the needs of each separate unit.
DSpace also has the benefit of being created by MIT and Hewlett-Packard, with some ongoing financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This has drawn the involvement of eight core universities that are working to evaluate DSpace in the context of various research institutions. All of this collaborative work means that a rich feature-set has developed that is compatible with the needs of such institutions, most notably a focus on long-term preservation of research materials.
Finally, ongoing support is an institutionalized priority. Last year a non-profit foundation was created by MIT and Hewlett-Packard to provide support for the growing DSpace community. 3 years ago Reply
Of the leading four software platforms Digital Commons is the only one that is not open source. Developed by the Berkeley Electronic Press, this system is offered as a fully hosted application with unlimited customer support. Berkeley Electronic Press does not just offer technical support–they will also assist institutions in engaging faculty and harvesting content. They claim to be able to get a repository up and running within 1 to 2 weeks with only an hour long staff training before an institution can begin adding content. For an institution with a small IT department, this is very appealing option. The trade-off, however, is that Digital Commons does not offer much in the way of customization, as the code is closed and sits on Berkeley Electronic Press' servers.
EPrints and FEDORA, on the other hand, are both open source. EPrints runs on a standard web server and requires no additional software aside from the EPrints base install. EPrints is thought of by many as the least complicated of the open source options and is well documented. However, it does not benefit from a wide developer base. Although the code is touted as open source, the University of Southampton works in a closed community and does not accept modifications to the base code. This could be a problem for an institution that needs a high level of customization when developing their repository.
The main difference between FEDORA and EPrints is that FEDORA is a web service, which means it needs a user interface built on top of it to have a manageable front-end. While FEDORA also runs on a standard web server, another application needs to be selected and installed for it to function fully. FEDORA is considered the most robust and highly customizable of the open source repository systems, and it might be a good option for an institution with a strong IT department and the technical staff to support it. 3 years ago Reply
Librarians will need to define policies, establish procedures and develop services for maintenance of the repository. The most important policies may be the ones that affect the contributors of content, as these policies will have to be clearly communicated across many organizations within the institution. This includes submission policies regarding acceptable content, file formats, version control, and required author metadata. Repository librarians will also need to design workflows that include review and editing processes for incoming objects. Ongoing work will be required to educate researchers in informational sessions on copyright and open access issues. Institutional policies will need to be established regarding whether the repository will be populated by voluntary self-archiving or through a mediated deposit process, in which librarians actually add objects to the repository on behalf of contributors.
Once the framework is in place, the repository infrastructure needs to be built. Repositories use OAI-PMH compliant systems so that their metadata can be harvested and cross-searched by services like OAIster. Specialized staff is needed to review, edit and structure the objects, customize systems, and add appropriate metadata. It is also crucially important that the project includes staff skilled in marketing, outreach, and liaison services to help recruit quality content. 3 years ago Reply
In time, the development of software platforms like EPrints, FEDORA, and DSpace helped lower the technological barriers for organizations wanting to establish repositories. Meanwhile, rising journal costs provided greater incentives for universities and libraries to work toward developing alternatives to the journal system. The confluence of these and other factors opened the road to the development of early institutional repositories, which began to emerge in the early years of this decade, some notable examples including E-Prints at Australian National University in 2001, and DSpace@MIT, the University of Edinburgh Research Archive, and eScholarship at the University of California, all launched in 2002.
Recently, interest in institutional repositories is growing in light of current developments such as the NIH mandate to make the products of taxpayer funded research freely available to the public and universities like Harvard urging their faculty members to deposit papers and other publications in institutional repositories. 3 years ago Reply
As we've already mentioned, institutional repositories are designed primarily to collect, preserve, and make available the scholarly output of a given academic institution. In contrast, ordinary digital libraries may be organized around any number of principles, some of the most common being topic, subject, discipline, or even a particular work or document.
Institutional repositories and digital libraries also differ in regard to how they acquire content. While the collections contained in digital libraries are generally the result of deliberate collection development efforts on the part of those operating the library, institutional repositories are typically dependent upon the voluntary contributions of researchers. While some institutions have attempted to require the deposit of certain types of materials, most depend upon voluntary participation. This fact is behind one of the greatest challenges facing institutional repositories today, that is, the relatively low rate of contribution by researchers. We'll discuss this a bit more later on.
Another difference between institutional repositories and digital libraries is that institutional repositories are fundamentally a place to store materials. Consequently, there may be minimal services offered to users. In contrast, digital libraries will often offer services to users, ranging from reference and research support to bibliographies of related materials to the sort of interpretive content and teaching resources we'll be including in our digital library. 3 years ago Reply
Significantly, these documents may be from any stage in the process of scholarly inquiry and may therefore carry varying levels of scholarly authority. For instance, while peer-reviewed published papers may be included, searchers will typically also find pre-prints, conference presentations, theses and dissertations, working papers, course materials, organizational records, or anything else a contributor may have chosen to deposit.
Finally, institutional repositories are closely tied to the ideals and goals of the open access movement and the belief that scholarly communication should be as open and free as possible. 3 years ago Reply