1. Institutional Repositories
Campus Computing 2003
Peter Binkley
24 June 2003

2. 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)

3. 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)

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Unpublished research data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

5. Requirements (1)
Hardware
Software
Policies
Buy-in

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

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

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

9. 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”

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

11. 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

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

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

14. What is DSpace? Joint project of MIT and HP
Open-source digital repository application
Widely adopted

15. 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

16. 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)

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

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

19. Institutional Repositories
Slides available at