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Institutional Repository: An Overview

Conference Paper · January 2014

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 Institutional Repository: An overview
C. Krishnamurthy
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Library & Information Science
Karnatak University, Dharwad. jrfkrishna@[Link]

Soubhagya S. Arali
Dept. of Library & Information Science
Karnatak University, Dharwad.
aralisoubhagya@[Link]

Abstract: An institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and

disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a
research institution. For a university, this would include materials such as research journal
articles, before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, and digital
versions of theses and dissertations. It might also include other digital assets generated by
academics, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects Institutional
repositories provide services to faculty, researchers, and administrators etc who wish to
archive there literature there by enhancing scholarly communication among the academia to
a great extent. In the present paper an attempt has been made to highlight the implications,
standards, and software, management issues of institutional repository.
Keywords: Institutional repository, Preprints, Postprints
Introduction
Institutional repositories of scholarly content have been receiving increasing attention
in the recent years. The main purposes of institutional repositories are to bring together and
preserve the intellectual output of an institution or organization or a university. The number
of significant developments, such as the launch of MIT’s Dspace, University of California’s
eScholarship and the growth of repositories based on the University of Southampton’s EPrint
software, has brought the issue of institutional repositories increasingly to the front. Further
the open access and open archives movement and the changes in scholarly communication to
remove barriers to access have begun driving the establishment of institutional repositories.
Keeping in view the recent changes in scholarly communication, emergence and
various standards and protocols, and trend towards open access INFLIBNET being a national
Centre for library and information Centre too is exploring the possibility of institutional
repository and archiving faculty publication of universities in India. During the course of
development of expert database and research projects database of academic and scientific
community in India, it was observed that faculty generates enormous amount of information,
which is untapped and not available for access. These content needs to be managed,
preserved, and maintained for larger access to the users. Faculty members wish additional
visibility for their resources. This can only be possible with the help of developing their own
institutional repositories (Prem Chand, 2004).

What is Institutional Repositories (IR)?

An institutional repository (IR) is a digital collection of an academic organization
intellectual output. Institutional repositories centralize, preserve, and make accessible the
knowledge generated by academic institutions. IRs 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.
An institutional repository (IR) is defined to be a web-based database (repository) of
scholarly material, which is institutionally defined as opposed to a subject-based repository;
cumulative and perpetual (a collection of record); open and interoperable (e.g. using OAI-
compliant software); and thus collects, stores and disseminates. In addition, most would
include long-term preservation of digital materials as a key function of IRs.
Implications of Institutional Repository
The institutions of higher education all over the world are experiencing the necessity
of managing their education, research and resources in a more effective and systematic way
in an open access environment. By making the research and scientific output easily available,
in turn will support the development of new relationships between the academicians and
scientists of various institutes and organizations at the national level. Some of the important
implications of IR’s include;
 Open access to scholarly information
 Resource discovery
 Dissemination of research widely
 Research evaluation and assessment
 Institutional and personal impact
 Information asset management by institutions
 Process improvements –store once, use many times
There are various software packages for use in general digital libraries. Institutional
repository software, which focuses primarily on preservation and access of locally produced
documents, particularly locally produced academic outputs, can be archived with the help of
Institutional repository software. Some of the basic requirements of hosting IR include;
 IR software (Open Source/Commercial)
 Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting(OAI-PMH)
protocol/software (Free)
 Intel/Pentium servers for IR
 Linux/Red Hat OS, MySQL/PostGress DBMS, Apache/Tomcat web server,
Perl/Java
Repositories-Standards
In traditional libraries, the ability to find works of interest is directly related to how
well they were cataloged. While cataloging electronic works digitized from a library's
existing holding may be as simple as copying or moving a record from the print to the
electronic form, complex and born-digital works require substantially more effort. To handle
the growing volume of electronic publications, new tools and technologies have to be
designed to allow effective automated semantic classification and searching. Therefore
repository standards include (Tmava, 2013):
 Metadata Standards
Dublin Core, SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model)
 Character Encoding standards
Unicode
 Persistent Identifiers
CNRI Handles (Corporation for National Research Initiatives)
DOI (Digital Object Identifiers)
 Harvesting Standards
OAI-PMH
Repository software
Every institution will have its own unique approach for establishing a repository that
reflects their specific context and community. However, there are a number of open source
softwares available to develop an institutional repository. Open-source software (OSS) is
computer software with its source code made available and licensed with the copyright holder
provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any
purpose. Open-source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. The
most widely used open source softwares are listed in the below table.
 ( Gonzalez, 2007 )
Repositories-Management and Organizational Issues
The management and organizational issues are of a great significance in the
development of a repository. The main issues which are considered to be as follows;
 Deposit options -Researcher self deposit and /or assisted deposit
 Metadata quality -Ensuring quality and rich metadata
 Mandatory metadata fields
 Digitization: Born digital / Scanning
 File formats: Accept all, Only PDF and/or other, Conversion
 Only full text database and/or Bibliographic
 Copyright: RoMeO Publishers Copyright policies
 Quality assurance: Peer review, Editing
-Depositor’s declaration: Non-exclusive license -Copyright/Patent/Trademarks
-Repository’s rights and responsibilities: Distribute, Store, Migrate, Copy Rearrang,
Remove
- Use Agreement: Copy, Distribute, Display, Share, Author credit
- Access: Open access or restricted access-Access: Full-text access or Abstract level
access (Sutradhar, B. 2008).

Benefits of Instituional Repository

 The case for a repository must be made to the institution or community that will own and
sustain it. In justifying a repository it is critical to work out a case that best aligns with the
priorities of the institution. For research-based institutions this means focusing on the benefits
to the institution in having a tool that can increase the usage and impact of its research effort,
maximize the visibility of its outputs and provide a management information system for
monitoring and assessing the research carried out in the institution. Some of the benefits
include:
 Free software, therefore appropriate for developing countries
 Easy to establish, availability of technical help.
 All IRs are interoperable, conforming to OAI-MPH international standards
 Distributed network, shared costs
 Searchable by Google, Yahoo and specialised search programs (eg OAIster, SHERPA
searches)
 Availability of usage (impact) statistics
Constraints of IR
Learning organizations are characterized by the constant stimulation of its members
for them to increase their abilities, that is to say, to learn. These organizations are capable of
transforming new technologies into new products in which the information is integrated,
assimilated and generated. To achieve this organizations have their own repository, but in this
process they are likely to face constraints particularly in the developing countries which
include:
 Absence of a well defined institutional policy
 Lack of IR expertise
 Insufficient funds for IT Infrastructure and manpower
 Apathy of authors towards time consuming and lengthy deposition procedure.
 Ignorance of users in the absence of appropriate literacy program
 Publisher’s rigid attitude towards copyright policy
 Customization of open source software is a bottle neck
 Nature of content: Classified/restricted and Unclassified/Open
 Diversity of content and the language used in the full texts
 Relying on unproven methods for long term digital preservation.
 Lack of initiation at the national level. etc

Conclusion
The digital environment has introduced new resource types and new user expectations
into the information landscape. In order to deliver a richer user experience and maximize
visibility of digital resources, it is critical to have metadata that complies with standards, both
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in its completeness and its adherence to metadata creation standards. Consistency is the key
factor in successfully managing different scholarly works in IRs and in making information
more widely and easily available to users. Regardless of the repository software, metadata
consistency plays a key role in describing and managing digital objects of different formats to
effectively integrate the contents of IR into the existing services and collections. Although
there are a number of contributing factors that affect digital resources visibility in IRs, it is
the rich metadata that is consistently encoded that makes the digital items more discoverable.
IRs provides services to faculty, researchers, and administrators who want to archive
research materials. Great progress has been made in the development of standards and
software tools that permit the easy creation of repositories. Creation and sustainability of a
repository heavily depend on thinking together and learning what others on the team think, so
decisions can be made within their working context. Librarians and information scientist and
administrator should come forward for planning a suitable model for their respective
institutions, and they have to work in collaboration to effectively implement IR, so as to bring
visibility to their institution in the present context of networked world and enhance scholarly
communication among the academic community.

References
1. Prem Chand, T. [Link] Murthy, V. (2004). Institutional Repositories, Open Access
Movement andOAI- PMH Complaint Software. 2nd Convention PLANNER, Manipur
University, Imphal.52-64.
2. Sutradhar, B. (2008). Open Access and Institutional Repositories: A Case Study of
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. 4th National Conference 4(2).27-30.
3. Tmava, A. M., & Alemneh, D. G. (2013). Enhancing content visibility in institutional
repositories: Overview of factors that affect digital resources discoverability.
iConference 2013 Proceedings, 855-859.
4. Yakel, E. Rieh, S. Y. (2008). Institutional Repositories and the Institutional
Repository: College and University Archives and Special Collections in an Era of
Change. The American Archivist, 71. 323-349.
5. Gonzalez, A. B. Porcel, A. F. (2007). Guidelines for the creation of institutional
repositories at universities and higher education organizations / Alfa Network Babel
Library, Valparaiso Columbus, Europe Aid Co-Operation Office. Babel Library, 30
p.
6. [Link] (Retrieved on 09/11/2013)