institutional repository – some definitions
18 Sep 09
ODLIS:
A set of services offered by a university or group of universities to members of its community for the management and dissemination of scholarly materials in digital format created by the institution and its community members, such as e-prints, technical reports, theses and dissertations, data sets, and teaching materials. Stewardship of such materials entails their organization in a cumulative, openly accessible database and a commitment to long-term preservation when appropriate. Some IRs are also used as electronic presses to publish e-journals and e-books. An institutional repository is distinguished from a subject-based repository by its institutionally defined scope. IRs are part of a growing effort to reform scholarly communication and break the monopoly of journal publishers by reasserting institutional control over the results of scholarship. An IR may also serve as an indicator of the scope and extent of the university’s research activities. (institutional repository (IR))
Wikipedia:
An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating — in digital form — the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.
For a university, this would include materials such as research journal articles, before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it might also include other digital assets generated by normal academic life, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects. (Institutional repository)
CARL:
An institutional repository (IR) is a digital collection of an institution’s intellectual output. IRs are a key infrastructure component in the digital environment because they provide better access to our digital assets and they ensure that digital objects are managed appropriately. (Canadian Institutional Repositories)
For the record. . . .
Posted by pzed on September 18, 2009 at 3.13pm
institutional repositories
16 Sep 09
I’ve been planning, for a few months now, to start using this space to think more deeply about my job. Among other things, I’m Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Windsor’s Leddy Library. What a job title like “Digital Initiative Librarian” might mean differs greatly from institution to institution; as in most things related to libraries, I think this is a by-product of the fact that we’re trying to figure out what it is we do anymore. I’m fortunate that I have a fair amount of leeway in deciding exactly what it is that our version of the Digital Initiatives Librarian will do.
But the position does come with some expectations, and one of these is to guide the development of our institutional repositories. The problem is, I’ve always been a little skeptical that libraries should dedicate resources to archiving copies of the published work of their faculty. Essentially, you end up with a large collection of disparate materials united only by the fact that at least one of their authors was affiliated with a specific institution. And nobody asks themselves, “Gee, I wonder what people at University X are doing in my discipline?” One of the reasons why academic journals exist is to collate research output by discipline, and if I want to stay on top of things in my field, I read those journals.
Not to say there aren’t useful things we can do under the rubric of institutional repositories. For institution, at Leddy we’ve been working on locally mounting digitized copies of UWindsor dissertations and theses. But generally, I don’t think creating additional copies of already published works and “exposing” their metadata is a particularly useful contribution to scholarship.
Now, it’s not like I haven’t read anything about this in the past, but I need to do a bit more focused reading over the next little while. And since I’m going to talk about it here, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to expose my prejudices first.
Posted by pzed on September 16, 2009 at 4.02pm
