How are Institutional Repositories (IRs) being used? We can get some clues from the kind of links made from the general web to IRs. Results will be presented from a project looking at the links made to the larger IRs in New Zealand; as well as three well established overseas IRs. The project examined whether links were the equivalent of formal citations, or whether they were informal links. Formal links comprised only 1.85% of the links, indicating that IRs may not be primarily forming part of the formal research communication structure. However informal links (largely from blogs and Wikipedia) comprised 18.2% of the links made to the IRs. Subject directory links comprised almost 50% of links. These results indicate that New Zealand IRs have a useful role in making research information available to the general public, even though they do not appear to be referred to intensively by other researchers.

1. Institutional Repositories: for scholars, or for the rest of us? Alastair G Smith School of Information Management Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand [email_address]

13. Yahoo Site Explorer interface

16. Results Formal research links: equivalent to citations 2% Informal research links: links from sources that do not have print equivalents 18% Directory links: made to documents because of their informational value 50%

18. Impact factor comparison

20. Influence of single document on small server

22. Wikipedia reference

23. Football refereeing paper