Institutional RepositoriesTools for scholarship

Mary WestellUniversity of CalgaryAMTEC 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 researchResponse to changing practices in

scholarly communicationFostering open access to the university’s

scholarly outputRaising the institution’s research profileEmphasis is on “born digital” materialsEasy web-based population, updating

Benefits to the University

Mechanism to conform with granting agency requirements

Evidence of scholarly productivityEvidence of scholarly excellencePromotion of research strengthsFacilitates 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, 2005http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html

DSpace@ucalgary.ca

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

DSpace@ucalgary.ca 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

DSpace@ucalgary.ca 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

DSpace@ucalgary.ca 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

DSpace@ucalgary.ca preserves --

Files are preserved in original formatFiles are migrated as appropriateSupport 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 agreementhttp://www.ucalgary.ca/library/dspace/license.html

Creative commons licensehttp://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 searchingIntegration with library and digital

resourcesIntegration with course management

softwareIntegration into the research culture

Specific interests for AMTEC?“Powering up new learning communities”

Learning ObjectsMulti-format approachSustainability of digital objectsAccess -vs- access controlScholarly journal publicationConference Proceedings

More information?

Check with your university library