n. (abbr. IR)a digital repository used to manage and disseminate content on behalf of a corporate body or collaborative and its communityLynch 2003, 2In my view, a university-based institutional repository is 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. While operational responsibility for these services may reasonably be situated in different organizational units at different universities, an effective institutional repository of necessity represents a collaboration among librarians, information technologists, archives and records mangers, faculty, and university administrators and policymakers.Thomas and Martin 2006, 35Another type of repository is the institutional repository, designed to store, manage, and sometimes preserve digital content produced by HE [Higher Education] departments.Markey et al. 2007, 1A considerable portion of the scholarly record is born digital, and some scholarship is produced in digital formats that have no physical, in-the-hand counterparts. The proliferation of digital scholarship raises serious and pressing issues about how to organize, access, and preserve it in perpetuity. The response of academic institutions has been to build and deploy institutional repositories (IRs) to manage the digital scholarship their learning communities produce.Davis 2008, 171Digital libraries and archivists in collecting repositories encounter similar technological challenges. Daniel Greenstein points out the inconsistencies in both data creation practices and the implementation of any single format or scheme: ‘Data resources are typically developed to meet the very specific needs and interests of particular end-users (one is all too familiar with the diversity borne of the phrase “fitness for purpose”). They rarely take into account the library’s needs as an organization responsible for layering services across a cacophony of electronic content.’ A number of colleges and universities are attempting to overcome these hurdles by establishing digital institutional repositories that would incorporate ‘digital objects’ from a variety of sources.Yakel et al. 2008, 324Institutional repositories are the latest development in series of systems aimed at managing digital content. At many colleges and universities, though, institutional repositories operate alongside digital libraries, content management systems, and digital asset management systems as part of the digital information management and provision universe.Zach and Peri 2010, 119Six of the 10 institutions with functioning repositories were “parking” documents in a variety of programs such as Greenstone, CONTENTdm, and other proprietary content management software, as well as in institutional repositories designed using DSpace and other open-source systems. All of these digital repositories essentially provide short-term preservation and access for discrete documents. Among the institutions interviewed, only 1 private institution and the 2 institutions connected with systemwide university programs were developing in-house software solutions to allow for long-term preservation.Dooley and Luce 2010, 61Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents have an institutional repository (IR). Half of all respondents reported that special collections units contribute collections content, which reflects the varying scope of IRs: some focus principally on the scholarly output of faculty and other researchers, while others include institutional records and other materials typically collected by special collections or archives.Conway and Landis 2011, 495As a matter of policy and advocacy, SAA embraces a version of the Green model that permits and encourages authors to retain their copyright, assign a Creative Commons license, and deposit their content in open-access institutional repositories.Gilliland 2014a, 232Digital repositories, and especially institutional repositories (IRs) maintained by academic and other scholarly institutions, are among the key components in the development of cyberinfrastructure and the kinds of scholarship it supports.Noonan and Chute 2014, 213What happens when an archivist accessions research data without taking “physical custody?” This may happen when research data is accessioned and then stored in an institutional repository (IR) that is not necessarily hierarchically part of the archives, thereby creating an issue of custody and/or conflict with the archives’ collection development policy. One purpose of placing research data into an IR or other digital preservation environment is to provide some minimum amount of preservation activity, at least preservation of the bit stream.Duranti and Franks 2015, 171In the early 2000s the apparent consensus was that institutional repositories were for capturing and providing access to the intellectual output of research institutions such as universities. Since then institutional repositories have come to serve a multiplicity of communities and objectives and have been completely redefined. Institutional repositories today fulfill a number of roles, including but not limited to capturing and providing access to intellectual outputs. Other services include the creation of temporary aggregations for use in teaching, publishing services for journals, monographs or conference proceedings, and space to enable intra- and inter-institutional collaborations.
Notes
Originally envisioned as a means of digital dissemination of scholarly work, institutional repositories’ remit has grown to include other digital repository functions and their contents to include born-digital records and digitized content from archives and libraries. Institutional repositories are especially in use in higher education.
