Transcript Institutional Repositories Who Cares?

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, 2005
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html
[email protected]
 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, 2003
[email protected] captures - Articles
 Preprints
 Conference Papers
 Data Sets
 Learning Objects
 Working Papers
 Technical Reports
 Presentations
 Images
 Sound
Adapted from: Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003
[email protected] 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
[email protected] 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
 Email notices for new items
Adapted from: Powerpoint Presentation, UTL Staff - April 22, 2003
[email protected] 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, 2003
Copyright and licensing
Standard license agreement
http://www.ucalgary.ca/library/dspace/license.html
Creative commons license
http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/ca/
DSpace Demonstration:
About DSpace:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/library/dspace
Searching the repository:
http://Dspace.ucalgary.ca
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