Institutional Repositories Campus Computing 2003 Peter Binkley 24 June 2003

Institutional Repository “... a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.” (Clifford Lynch)

Elements A submission mechanism; A long-term storage system; A management policy with regard to submission of documents and their preservation; An open machine interface, that enables third parties to collect data from the archive (van de Sompel)

Contents Published record of university's research Unpublished research data Record of university's teaching E-Theses Archives of university's activities Digitization projects

Requirements (1) Hardware Software Policies Buy-in

Requirements (2) Administration support Faculty participation Long-term commitment Maintenance Migration

Whose Job? “... a collaboration among librarians, information technologists, archives and records managers, faculty, and university administrators and policymakers.” (Clifford Lynch)

Lynch’s Warnings Repositories as tools for institutional control Repositories simply as alternatives to traditional publishing Inadequate institutional commitment

Federation Part of network of repositories: institutional and disciplinary Interoperability based on standards (web services; Dublin Core metadata; OAI metadata harvesting protocol) “Keep the stuff, share the metadata”

arXiv: A discipline-based Repository http://www.arxiv.org: archive for physics, mathematics, non-linear science and computer science Characteristics: Pre-print Self-archiving Subject-specific Simple interface

Roles Repositories are data providers Others can be service providers Mount the content, expose the metadata Others can be service providers Harvest the metadata, build added-value services

Who are the data providers? 99 repositories Digital Library Federation evaluation E-Journal publishers

Who are the service providers? OAIster: University of Michigan Arc: Old Dominion University

What is DSpace? Joint project of MIT and HP Open-source digital repository application Widely adopted http://www.dspace.org

Structures Items: files or groups of files comprising “archival atoms”, controlled by metadata Collections: groups of related items, with submission policies Communities: groups of users, with permissions structures, and a portal

Items File formats have levels of preservation service: 0: format not known: bitstream 1: forming guidance: bitstream, migration if possible 2: supported: bitstream, migration expected Persistent names (CNRI handles)

Collections Submission policies: User provides baseline metadata Approval process: reviewers, approvers, metadata editors

So … The technology is reaching maturity The policy issues are clear The benefits are significant Shall we … ?

Institutional Repositories Email: peter.binkley@ualberta.ca Slides available at http://www.ualberta.ca/~pbinkley