Institutional Repositories
The Assessment and Adoption of Institutional Repositories
Annotations by Brooke Bowers, Michelle Kukan, Margaret Wade, and Kelly Wilson
Abrizah, Hilmi, and Kassim discuss the willingness among academia to contribute to an institutional repository from the perspective of an IR stakeholder. They indicate the major reasons for opting out of an IR and how this negatively affects collaboration throughout the library and information sciences field. The authors supply evidence that more efficient communication is needed among parties concerning such matters as intellectual property and content quality issues. Nevertheless, some individuals have still raised the more basic problems of time restraints and a lack of technical skills.
This scholarly article discusses management models to promote the mission of disseminating research information. The author emphasizes this mission should be a top priority for all universities, and the focus of these management models demonstrates how this will encourage contributions to the institutional repository (IR) by creating service frameworks which can be carried out by library staff. By providing these services, librarians will support faculty and student submissions to meet the needs of the university. The two approaches that are discussed as means of support are mediated deposit and mass customization. In the mediated model, library staff carries out the activities to determine if publications are eligible on behalf of the author, and in the mass customization model, web pages showcase an individual’s work which is maintained by repository staff. The discussion includes references to “SelectedWorks” option from Digital Commons repository platform for mass customization. In both models librarians must be highly-skilled with both technical expertise, and high-quality customer service skills to promote and support the development of the institutional repository.
This article is a basic run through of the best ways to get an institutional repository started and how to achieve success using it. The articles gives step by step instructions for a well thought out plan for IR implementation. The article highlights the benefits that an institutional repository offers its institution’s faculty members. This article also provides planning strategies that will foster success and a growing and thriving institutional repository. It is certain that a librarian must collaborate with their institutions faculty to serve the faculty members needs and the needs of the university. When scholarly works are highlighted and accessible in an open platform, it benefits all the way down to the student level. An institutional repository is a platform to highlight the research and scholarly works coming out of an institution, this article shows how to make that a successful endeavor.
Bankier and Perciali, President and Director at The Berkeley Electronic Press respectively at the time this article was published, reveal that university faculty are reluctant to self-archive in IRs and discuss ways in which faculty can be enticed to start using IRs which adds to discussion on the assessment and adoption of IRs. They point to the idea that faculty believe an IR is a place where works go after formal publishing in subscription-based journals which give faculty little incentive to use or engage with IRs.Bankier and Perciali call for a rebranding of the IR as a lively, active scholarly community in which faculty can use the IR as a showcase of their work. Additionally, academic institutions can use IRs to enter the publishing world by developing peer-reviewed online journals in open access IRs. The authors add to the literature by suggesting IRs are more than a place to store and retrieve digital content and should be used in active ways that allow for scholarly communication and peer-reviewed online publishing. However, Bankier and Perciali fail to address how this might affect traditional scholar-publisher relationships.
This articles highlights the rocky past of the institutional repository. In the early years, many faculty members did not feel the need to participate in institutional repositories, which caused for a fairly high failure rate among the first initial endeavors. This article goes on to discuss the ways in which institutional repositories are becoming successful and achieving sustainability through campus-wide engagement. Librarians are starting to change the look and role of the library by working closely with faculty, students, administrators and Deans to offer a valuable resource and service. Using the institutional repository to address the issue of scholarly communication, research and knowledge sharing, libraries are moving in the direction of an open access initiative. This new role will help to take libraries into the future digitally.
Author Sadanand Y. Bansode, an Associate Professor in the University of Pune’s Library Science Department in western India, discusses the need of institutional repositories (IR) at the university level using his own university as an example. Bansode argues that, despite the deluge of scholarship, researchers are often impeded in their attempts to access data published as digital content due to the subscription prices of journals or their inaccessibility due to licensing restrictions. The author advocates the use of institutional repositories at the university level which would increase the visibility of faculty scholarship, provide open access to an institution’s scholarship, and preserve scholarship that might not be published elsewhere. The greatest strength in Bansode’s article, and why he adds to the literature of IR assessment and implementation, is his step-by-step breakdown of how an IR was established at the University of Pune which adds to the discussion of the topic of adoption of IRs. Although useful as a case-study, the article was poorly translated which subtracted from its usefulness. Additionally, Bansode’s institutional repository at the University of Pune would only receive a stage 1 rating based on McGovern and McKay’s scale of the development level of the IR which does not grant Bansode much authority on developing IRs.
This scholarly article presents the benefits of an institutional repository to an institution, by focusing on the inclusion of student research in the university’s institutional repository (IR). Because an IR offers an effective way to manage digital scholarly output for faculty, staff and students, its ability to disseminate this information supports the larger global goal toward open access. Discussion includes the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) Digital Commons’ use at Utah State University (USU) to support the successful discovery of research, while also being utilized as a means to recruit high caliber students (who recognize the value of such an ideal medium to display their work). Librarians at USU have successfully integrated cross-disciplinary interest and involvement in the IR to benefit the overall success of the IR, library and university. Discussion of benefits includes e-portfolios and use of “SelectedWorks” customization for access to students’ research in the IR.
For a developing nation like Ghana, a major roadblock of utilizing institutional repositories remains in educating individuals about copyright and ownership of scholarly work. Implementation issues can occur in any setting, but more so in nations with a larger “digital divide,” as the authors argue. Librarians and other professionals have a duty to inform the authors on the basics of institutional repositories and this is currently lacking in Ghana. Scholars in Ghana are also held back by problems in the information communication and technology (ICT) infrastructure, which is more vital now than ever to secure future scientific collaboration.
This scholarly article is written about the Booth Library Institutional Repository at Eastern Illinois University (EIU) that focuses on faculty and student scholarship and also supports what became the University Archives. The library partnered with Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) to implement the IR with the Digital Commons platform. This combination utilized technology support from bepress, which would allow library staff to focus on the content. Migration of the University Archives from outdated legacy web applications and from unstable software platforms were large leading edge technology projects that were assisted by expertise from traditional librarians who recycled original cataloging metadata for batch uploading into the IR. This “village” approach demonstrated that the collaborative culture was imperative for smooth migration and positively influenced the progress of the IR. It is important to note that although the title is accurate in stating that EIU “grew” their repository in two years, there were many years of groundwork that preceded it, and these years were likely vital to the success of the effort.
This article examines the implementation cost of institutional repositories in the academic library setting. The authors review the open access (OA) movement and cost of academic journal subscriptions. Implementation is dependent upon the type of content and the parties involved, and should be carefully considered before jumping in to a particular IR system. The authors surveyed higher education institutions around the world that can be classified in the Carnegie Classification as “Research Universities with high or very high research activity.” Despite this study, gaps remain in data regarding an institution’s budget for an IR, however, maintenance costs tend to be lower when a professional is on staff for collection development.
Leslie M. Delserone, a librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries and member of its E-Science and Data Services Collaborative, discusses the approach the UMN Libraries took in an effort to manage and appropriately steward the institution’s research output. This article, Delserone explains, can be used as an example for institutions that are also attempting to consider long-term digital stewardship in conjunction with their institutional repositories. It adds to the current literature on the subject by suggesting IR managers need to look beyond the immediate needs and usefulness of IRs. An internal assessment at the UMN revealed that researchers who might consider depositing to an IR wanted help with data organization and manipulation, and wanted standards to reference. Additionally, assessment revealed that the stewardship of the researcher’s deposited content was not a high priority for many of them and that they assumed the Libraries would handle it. Overall, the article was a fine example of a top-tier university’s attempt at implementing data management in their institutional repository and revealed that collaboration and long-term planning are of critical importance to institutional repositories.
In this article, the author touches on the fact that the library is moving into the digital age and so must the librarian. The author refers to this new librarian as a “Cybrarian”. The new digital age is transforming the traditional library into a digital library. The many ways in which libraries are emerging with new digital services include, institutional repositories, scholarly publishing, digital content management and digital archives and preservation. These are all concepts that are being adopted by libraries and libraries worldwide. This articles highlights this new role libraries are playing and the ways in which they are developing new ideas to accommodate these new roles. Collection development is no longer only concentrated on physical monographs. This falls into place with the rise of the institutional repository and open access scholarly communication.
This conference report of a four-person panel focusing on issues of open access, presents the varied experiences of staff from different institutions using institutional repositories (IR). They offer perspectives on the use of IRs for open access aims. The first speaker, an editor for a university press, provides an overview of intellectual property rights and dissemination of research information. The second speaker, working within an academic library, discussed scholarly communications, as it relates to open access and IR management, and through a description of the duties involved, emphasizing that library staff needs to be educated about IR’s and open access. The last speaker, from the same academic institution as the librarian, presents the results of a survey of faculty at their institution. They were surveyed about their experiences publishing in traditional ways and in open access journals, considering costs, equity of access, peer review and uncertain publishers. Although the panel did not discuss a specific institutional repository, vendor, or platform, the issue of open access is an important factor to be educated about of when implementing, managing and providing staff for an institutional repository.
The purpose of the study in this article was to determine the most instrumental elements for international users of U.S. institutional repositories. In order to increase the access to knowledge and the amount of collaborative material, successful factors from this study should be replicated in future implementations of institutional repositories. The authors were interested in what kind of effects can be expected from this international usage, particularly whether one software type was preferred over another by users. While polled users selected mainly BePress or DSpace repositories, a majority of responses were “unsure.” While this leaves a large gap in our understanding of our international IR users, we must continue catering to their needs as they arise, and stay vigilant of further research on the topic.
Like the Pinfield et al. article, Genaie et al. examine the data collected by the OpenDOAR project to ascertain trends in open access digital repositories throughout the world which is a useful addition to the topic of the adoption of IRs. The article reveals nothing new as far as data results, but adds to the literature on the subject of IRs by calling for Open Access (OA) repositories to offer interfaces in multiple languages, not just in the now prevalent OA system language English. This language barrier, according to the authors, hampers the implementation of repositories. Another way to help the adoption of repositories, Genaie et al. argue, is to offer seminars, workshops, and even conferences which would reveal the benefits of repositories to scholars who might be reluctant about IRs benefits.
This article explores the necessary hurdles for the implementation of an institutional repository. Faculty involvement at an institution can be controlled by positive marketing of the IR. In addition, accurate metadata ingestion must be assured at the onset. Software is also a concern, depending on the available funds and staff for maintenance. The crucial step in the bookkeeping of the project is the carefully track each and every costs along the way, which may include a cost for document digitization and self-archiving. Giesecke provides readers with a dynamic view of the institutional repository, one in which the IR is continuously dependent upon its staff and the project’s cost.
Hanief Bhat explores the institutional repository in the Indian context, where thousands of research papers are published every year. However, without the visibility that an IR provides, scientists lack the ability to collaborate in their work. The author supports the open access movement and its critical need for the world of Indian research. Hanief Bhat’s research is evident that institutional repositories are becoming more widely used in India, albeit slowly. As our research becomes increasingly global, we must continue to encourage all authors to embrace open access institutional repositories.
This article is a report of an evaluative study that provides a general overview of institutional repositories and their gain in popularity in recent years. Many research institutions and academic libraries have adopted IRs in the last couple of years. This study gives the reader some general knowledge about the uses and advantages of institutional repositories and scholarly communications. The study used five different open-access repositories for general study and data collection. The article reports back the findings of the study in general terms. It discusses repositories quality, credibility and preservation effectiveness, as well as the Institutional repositories ability to spread research and knowledge in the academic community.
Terence K. Huwe, the Director of Library and Information Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses what three “wishes” he has for digital repositories that would fill some gaps he sees in the world of repositories. These include calling for repositories to offer a greater web presence with links from the institution’s top-level browser to the IR’s content, the use of dynamic web pages that automatically generate and direct users to content related to whatever they are currently viewing, and for librarians to get more serious about creating and using repositories. Huwe contributes to the literature on IRs by successfully pointing out gaps in many repositories, such as not having a solid discovery interface that may inhibit users from finding information at times, and by suggesting solutions through his “wishes.” Those implementing IRs would benefit from taking Huwe’s advice to make their IRs more user-centered.
This scholarly article focuses on institutional repository (IR) implementation and management in lieu of open access (OA) policy as it relates to the creation of a simple workflow for the Rice University Fondren Library staff. An extensive background of open access, scholarly publishing and campus participation at similarly sized academic institutions is presented, citing their efforts with similar constraints as Fondren library. These constraints being, IR content recruiting practices, resources of staff (both time and skill), and funding. The author includes a literature review citing institutions who have published on OA and IR workflows, naming the most comprehensive discussions and “early adopters” of OA policies and the commonalities to help develop their workflow. Fondren staff identified three important aspects for a workflow option as: existing library resources, alignment with existing policy, and flexibility to accommodate the changing nature of OA. The “good enough” workflow follows three phases: Discover, Manage and Deposit. In using resources such as Google Scholar, Zotero and SHERPA/RoMEO in the first two phases, the library incurred no additional costs. Using a “do it for them” approach, library staff was able to ensure consistent metadata and quality control of content, to batch-imports via spreadsheets to open source software platform DSpace in the third phase.
This article introduces the institutional repository known as DRUGG at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The authors discuss the adoption process, which has resulted in vast usage from the public sector, as well as background data, which leads to successful modern usage of DRUGG. The repository has been overwhelmingly successful for the University of Ljubljana, connecting the achievements of the institution with its peers. At its core, this article provides evidence to support the essential components of institutional repositories, namely visibility and collaboration.
This article explains and describes the success factors for institutional repositories. It's explores the factors that many consider to be critical in the implementation and success of institutional repositories. This articles also ventures out to say that many scholars and researchers are not in total agreement in what constitutes an institutional repository’s success. Surveys and factor analysis were performed with 46 initial factors being key players in the importance of a successful repository. The summation of the article poses questions about the possibility of building best practices and guidelines to be able to monitor the success of institutional repositories.
This article covers the staffing and workflow of a mature institutional repository. IRs are becoming a mainstay in academic libraries. Many institutions are just starting their institutional repository journey. However, there are those institutions that have had an IR established for some time now. There are new challenges faced with a more mature IR. There are workloads that are increasing as the IR grows in size. A growing institutional repository needs to be staffed properly and have a steady workflow in place. This article addresses these issues for the more mature institutional repository, which will ultimately be of concern to every academic library with an institutional repository sometime in the future.
In this scholarly article, experts McGovern and McKay, both associated with preservation planning through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), address the gap between institutional repositories (IRs) and the digital preservation of content in the long run. As the authors make clear, institutions often create IRs but fail to consider future organizational, technological, and economic obligations incurred when digital materials are ingested. They discuss the five developmental stages that institutions go through until fully realizing a sound digital preservation plan as part of an IR. Stage one includes recognizing it’s the institution’s concern. In stage two, institutions begin to take action to preserve their content. State three occurs when the digital preservation and institutional repository begin to consolidate. In stage four, relevant resources are brought together and the preservation of repository deposits becomes institutionalized. In the fifth and most fully developed stage, the authors argue that the following conditions are all met: having the IR and any separate institutional digital preservation program join forces; explicitly state preservation policies and requirements from depositors and the beginning; manage digital materials (which includes realizing that not all materials deposited will have long-term usefulness); provide tools and guidance to depositors; embrace the OAIS lifecycle model; and incorporate institutional records.This is an excellent reference for both institutions considering a repository and for institutions with IRs that have yet to think about their long term preservation plans. Additionally, their Five Stages are a useful benchmark to determine how well developed an I.R. is and add to the literature on the topic of assessment and adoption of IRs.
Paul’s article discusses the important role institutional repositories have in an organization’s “intellectual capital,” focusing on nine IRs in special libraries in the National Capital Region of India. The author looked at the level of user satisfaction of the IR, which is generally an issue that demands further research. The majority of the 496 users in this study did not publish in IRs. Paul describes the survey respondents’ opinions as “user-specific.” Respondents are either faculty members or research scholars, and the IR serves both audiences differently. Plagiarism and the potential for lost content in IRs are still major concerns for prospective authors. Nevertheless, higher quality and wider readership tend to encourage contributors to publish in an IR.
Pinfield et al.’s scholarly article examines the rise of open-access repositories throughout the world in the last ten years using information extracted from data collected by OpenDOAR project. The authors trace academic and research communities using IRs and conclude that a combination of existing infrastructure, language, culture, policy, and funding were all important factors to their adoption of an IR early on. This article contributes to the discussion of IR adoption and assessment with a very useful conclusion: the use of mandates to encourage researchers to deposit scholarly work into an IR was a crucial component of its widespread adoption among the scholarly community. Institutions considering IRs could take Pinfield et al.’s advice and mandate deposits into the IR for their best chance at its widespread adoption. Besides institutional mandates, the authors see government and funder mandates as being critical to future adoption of open-access repositories.
This scholarly article compares electronic resource management (ERM) principles librarians may already be familiar with to institutional repository (IR) implementation and management. The principles of Techniques to Electronic Resource Management (TERMS), by Jill Emery and Graham Stone (available through alatechsource.org), are examined by Pinkas and Lin offering adaptations of the six “TERMS” as tasks in a lifecycle for implementing and managing an IR. Following this discussion of the tasks, is a summary of how these tasks were applied in a workflow for the IR at The University of Maryland Health Sciences and Human Services Library Archive. Issues of open access, academic works and content discovery are discussed as they relate to the tasks in the workflow. The infrastructure using open source software, DSpace with the Red Hot Linux operating system and web server Tomcat is noted as are access controls, embargoes and copyright issues citing Sherpa/ROMEO as a source for checking open access policies which may be of interest for those seeking information on implementing or managing IR’s
George S. Porter, an engineering librarian at CalTech, argues that one of the hardest aspects of establishing an IR is inertia as it is hard to get faculty to become depositors. He suggests focusing on late-career faculty who have published the most materials and are more likely to want to preserve their life’s work. Porter also suggests adding content that is easy to obtain into the IR, such as gray literature, theses, and dissertations. His advice adds to the literature as it offers a starting point for IR managers just starting to collect materials.
This article addresses the integration of SHERPA/RoMEO into institutional repositories and their workflow. SHERPA/RoMEO is a database of publisher’s policies on open access and self-archiving. The author or library staff member can use the simple interface to search for a particular publisher’s policy on self-archiving and remain in the limits of copyright. This article discusses the software development to integrate this database directly into some institutional repository platforms, such as DSpace or the new Islandora Scholar. This new software would be essential to all universities that are adopting an open access policy and beginning a new institutional repository. Populating an institutional repository brings along new challenges along with copyright concerns. SHERPA/RoMEO is an authority for any librarian that is trying to populate an infant institutional repository.
Rieh et al.’s scholarship on staff’s perceptions and experiences of IR implementation derives its conclusions from an extensive survey the authors conducted as well as interviewing thirty-six staff members at a variety of IRs. Their findings about why institutions implemented IRs echo much of the other literature and include scholarly communication, subscription fees, and an increase in the visibility of faculty’s work. However, the authors contribute to the literature in several ways, including providing a concise review of previous literature on planning and implementing IRs which is helpful for researchers who need to gain some background in the field. Rieh et al. also find that many of the staff involved with the development of IRs at their institutions were not concerned with preservation, although a few were and these were attempting to become Trusted Digital Repositories. Another contribution the authors make is their finding at how ad-hoc the training of potential depositors is; their suggestion of increasing the education of depositors to the benefits and uses of IRs as part of a pre-designed service model for all IRs is a useful contribution to the topic of IR adoption and assessment.
Robertson and Borchert are both in digital content management at the university level and write this article to address ways in which IRs can preserve content for the long-term. The authors discuss format choices, open-access software, backups, and LOCKSS networks as they argue that many who work with IRs have mostly focused on getting scholars to deposit, or have solely focused on access, and that preservation needs to be addressed even during the ingest phase. This resource adds to the literature on the subject by addressing what IRs should be planning for beyond the ingest and access stages. However, the authors do not spend much time discussing the idea that not everything entered into an IR should be preserved as one would expect in an article about long-term preservation.
This scholarly article uses a metaphorical framework to describe the components, processes and contributor’s that produce a successful institutional repository (IR). The presenter Tammy Sugarman, Associate Dean for Collections at Georgia State University Library, briefly discussed the history of IR’s and how they “came to be seen as tools for reflecting the intellectual life of their institutions…preserving in digital form the unique content produced at those institutions” (p. 81). A discussion of the various “ingredients,” that is, the various types of IR scholarly or creative works, led to the “bakers,” or librarians and the necessary skills they require to “bake” or produce IR’s in “flavors” that reflect the mission of an institution. A brief background history on IR’s and hosting solutions are summarized and a virtual “tasting” of three different IR’s complete the discussion. The three featured IR “flavors” included: a showcase of students’ work and achievement as examples for both job-seeking students and for promoting the university, a collection that attests to a law schools’ legal expertise and an archive that generates interest by providing unique historical insights of the university.
This article focuses on the relationship between institutional repositories and research users. The first section covers researcher needs and what institutional repositories essentially provide to researchers and their founding institutions. This includes a breakdown of what an institutional repository is designed to do and what it is supposed to provide. It also breaks down general user needs and how they relate to institutional repositories or how they can utilize them. The second section focuses on the challenges that can occur with repository use. This section also talks about the implementation and integration of repositories and its effect on the practice of research and researchers. The general conclusion of the article states that great strides have been made in the realm of scholarly communication. However, because of overall low deposit rates in repositories, much more effort is still needed to engage researchers.
In this article, Sawant looks at the implementation of the institutional repository in India and the expected outcomes of its execution. The author analyzes 16 IRs throughout India covering mainly the science and technology sectors of research. The web administrators of the IRs the author surveyed were a majority of library and information science professionals. The planning stages for their IRs had taken up to a year or more. The author’s findings proved as expected; respondents were concerned about visibility and viewed open access in a positive light. A lack of technical experience and administrator empathy were two roadblocks for the implementation of an institutional repository. This article suggests the potential for a better user experience of the IR. This research indicates that authors as well as researchers require more education on the possibilities of the institutional repository.
This scholarly article discusses institutional repositories (IR) and five areas of focus relating to their current state. The background information covers trends toward e-resources use in the academic library, describing opportunities for cross-discipline support and collaboration to promote scholarly communication and repository initiatives. There are five areas of focus discussed. The first, Interoperability and Visibility, involves adopting standards for interoperability of metadata and linking with other IRs; visibility is gained through optimized metadata. The second focus is Engagement and Dissemination, citing the SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide to help promote and disseminate IR scholarship. The third focus is Researcher Participation, describing the need to provide services for researchers to buy into submitting to the IR. The fourth focus is Education, detailing how an IR provides learning opportunities for open access, information literacy, digital curation and copyright. The last focus is Information Stability and “link rot,” emphasizing that an IR’s intentional stable URLs are a solution to this problem. An analysis of a survey of IRs follows, emphasizing the value of collaborative efforts for the successful management and future of IRs.
This article addresses the issue of embargoes within institutional repositories. Depending on the guidelines set up specifically for individual repositories, students and faculty can place embargoes on who can view their work in the repository. This author specifically addresses student embargoes within repositories, more specifically embargoes in place to protect collaborating faculty members. Many faculty members do not want their ideas and research available before publication. This article also explores the critical role that librarians play in developing guidelines for their institutional repositories so student work can be recognized and faculty work can be protected. The author highlights best practices that are in place to help benefit students and faculty alike.
The use of long-term preservation file formats, particularly PDF, at two large Spanish institutional repositories, DDUB (Dipòsit digital de la Universidad de Barcelona) and TDX (Tesis Doctorales en Red), was analyzed in this article. Some research has shown that the PDF/Archiving (PDF/A) format does not meet long-term preservation standards, although this format is favored in the United States. To examine the repositories’ files, the authors used an open-source tool developed by The National Archives (UK) called DROID (Digital Record Object IDentification), which precisely identifies the format of a file and communicates this to the PRONOM registry of format information. Functioning at an extremely high success rate, DROID indicated to the researchers that PDF versions over the course of 13 years gradually increased, and the PDF/A format was rarely used at all. This research provides an excellent example of the importance of file format and version in IRs; the latest in a particular standard may not always match what authors are utilizing.
This scholarly article discusses the implementation of the institutional repository (IR) at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), a residential college of about 6,000 students. Librarians at TCNJ recognized the need for an IR and began the initiative after considering options for implementing an IR including: consortia, vendor-hosted platforms such as bepress, and independently operated repositories. With grant funding and campus resources the team selected open-source software, IR+, because of its promising features. Communication was established with the software developer in order to assess hardware requirements. Cross-disciplinary collaboration between the faculty librarians with other departmental faculty publication lists were obtained to establish metadata profiles. Once the IR was functional, the next priority focused on submissions. The presentation concluded with Tosaka and Weng cautioning against the fear of failure, encouraging attendees with limited resources to keep the larger mission in mind and to exercise creativity to reach their goals.
This article discusses the growing challenge of name disambiguation in institutional repositories. Multiple authors, authors with more than one published name and incomplete author information are all challenges that staff of institutional repositories face when entering in metadata. These issues cause problems for searching and retrieving of items in institutional repositories. This article explains a program taking place at Boise State that has its staff working with various tools for disambiguation to solve the name duplicate problem. This program is working with ScholarWorks to document the right tools to face this challenge head on. Some of the main systems explored are ORCID, Google Scholar, ResearcherID and Scopus. Name authority tools will continue to be utilized as well as continued focus on metadata standards. This area of study is essential to growing institutional repositories.
This scholarly article focuses on the assessment of an academic institutional repository (IR) by its users in order to determine if the works of the IR contained the information the users were seeking. The goal of the IR at Utah State University’s Library was not only to disseminate publications for the benefit of its authors, but also to emphasize the university’s mission to serve the public. With that mission in mind, the USU’s IR, Digital Commons, strives to curate and provide access to all of the research conducted at USU. This well-established IR attributes its success to many factors including reliance on bepress for technical support, which allows library staff to focus on content. Part of this content focus includes building cross-disciplinary relationships with faculty and identifying if the IR can fill other needs. By taking a “do it for them” approach with faculty, a collaborative effort is accomplished on the part of specialized librarians who handle copyright, bibliographic tasks and ingestion for research works. Lastly, USU utilizes administrative support for scholarly and open access initiatives. Planning continues for success for the IR through a survey conducted which helped assess perceived needs for future projects to assist researchers and raise public awareness of the IR at USU.
