Institutional Repositories Tools for scholarship Mary Westell University of Calgary AMTEC Conference May 26, 2005

What is an Institutional Repository? “An institutional repository (IR) is a digital collection of a university's intellectual output. Institutional repositories centralize, preserve, and make accessible the knowledge generated by academic institutions. They also form part of a larger global system of repositories, which are indexed in a standardized way and searchable using one interface, providing the foundation for a new model of scholarly publishing." ( Canadian Association of Research Libraries )

What are the benefits? Stewardship of university research Response to changing practices in scholarly communication Fostering open access to the university’s scholarly output Raising the institution’s research profile Emphasis is on “born digital” materials Easy web-based population, updating

Benefits to the University Mechanism to conform with granting agency requirements Evidence of scholarly productivity Evidence of scholarly excellence Promotion of research strengths Facilitates interdisciplinarity

A personal digital 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” ( Clifford Lynch, ARL Bimonthly Report, 226 )

Benefits for faculty: An infrastructure is available for you to archive and provide wide access to your research and publications You can control the ‘community’ and ‘collection’ and self-archive Tools are available to work collaboratively with your research group It is a showcase for your work

Benefits for faculty Your born digital materials are archived – safekeeping The process is already worked out – saves time and training for graduate students and research partners No more maintaining a server! No more broken links!

Scholars note ‘decay’ of citations to online references “After analyzing more than 1,126 [footnotes that cite Web materials] citations, taken from online versions of five prestigious communication-studies journals, they found that 373 of the links or 33 percent, were dead. Of the 753 links that worked, only 424 pointed to information pertinent to the citation.” Carlson, Scott. Chronicle of Higher Education: Today’s news, March 14, 2005

Faculty centric model: “The findings of our work-practice study suggest that with a faculty-centric approach to the design and marketing of repositories, IRs could become a compelling and useful tool.” Foster, Nancy Fried and Susan Gibbons “Understanding faculty to improve content recruitment for institutional repositories” D-Lib Magazine 11 (1) January,

Captures  Digital research material in any format  Directly from faculty or their designate  Large-scale, stable, managed long-term storage Describes  Descriptive, technical, rights metadata  Persistent identifiers Distributes  Via WWW, with necessary access control Preserves  Many approved digital formats Adapted from: Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003

captures -- Articles Preprints Conference Papers Data Sets Learning Objects Working Papers Technical Reports Presentations Images Sound Adapted from: Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003

describes -- Descriptive metadata  Forms based  Standards – Dublin Core Structural metadata  For complex (multi page items)  Automatic text searching Rights metadata  Embedded rights information Persistent ID  Persistent location

distributes -- Via secure web server Access control Persistent identifiers Expose to Web search engines Document(s) appears in database via:  Searchable “tiered” database  Community portal  Author and title listing  notices for new items Adapted from: Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003

preserves -- Files are preserved in original format Files are migrated as appropriate Support Levels vary with file format (MIT):  Supported: full support  Known: recognize, but cannot guarantee full support  Unsupported: cannot recognize a format; these will be listed as "application/octet-stream" Adapted from: Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003

Copyright and licensing Standard license agreement Creative commons license

DSpace Demonstration: About DSpace: Searching the repository:

Canadian Association of Research Libraries IR Project Implement repositories based on a variety of content and software Research innovation in scholarly publishing Sharing best practices and lessons learned

CARL Research Issues in populating the Institutional Repository Cross-repository searching Integration with library and digital resources Integration with course management software Integration into the research culture

Specific interests for AMTEC? “Powering up new learning communities” Learning Objects Multi-format approach Sustainability of digital objects Access -vs- access control Scholarly journal publication Conference Proceedings

More information? Check with your university library