EDUCAUSE | Digital Collections; Institutional Repositories; and Articles, Papers, and Reports

Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education

ckeller — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:51:48 -0500

Ithaka's 2006 survey of faculty members sought to determine their attitudes related to online resources, electronic archiving, teaching and learning and related subjects. This study affords the opportunity to develop trend analysis of many measurements collected in the 2003 and 2000 faculty surveys. As in the past, Ithaka developed a robust set of disciplinary and other demographic analyses that have allowed them to learn more about how best to serve the needs of different types of faculty members. Findings include;

Attitudes towards the possibility of a transition away from print format, both for scholarly journals and monographs
Perceptions of libraries and their value, including specific library functions, and how these perceptions are changing
Preferences in research practices, including disciplinary differences and changes over time
Attitudes towards archiving of both print and electronic resources
Preferences that lead authors to choose among scholarly journals in which to publish their articles, as well as attitudes towards digital repositories

Pooling Scholars’ Digital Resources

ckeller — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:11:46 -0600

George Mason U. and the Internet Archive are preparing a system that will let scholars upload documents to the public domain for sharing.

Utah Digital Repository Initiative: Building a Support System for Institutional Repositories

ckeller — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:26:28 -0600

As the deployment of institutional repositories (IR) becomes mature, more libraries will take advantage of consortial or regional ties to provide support, training, and expertise in IR development. This support structure is essential for organizations that otherwise would not have the staff, time, or infrastructure to creation an IR. The Utah Digital Repository (http://harvester.lib.utah.edu/utah_ir/), an LSTA grant-funded project, serves as a model for the creation of a statewide repository. This case study will explore the development and growth of institutional repositories in academic libraries in the state of Utah. Built on the existing framework of the Mountain West Digital Library, the Utah Digital Repository project provided a librarian's toolkit, training sessions, outreach, and technical assistance as pilot sites developed an IR. This framework of support ensures that an academic library of any size can launch an institutional repository. A single web site allows users to search the aggregated metadata of multiple institutions. This article includes statistics and survey results in addition to an overview of the development process that will aid other libraries considering the development of similar shared resources.

Census of Institutional Repositories in the U.S

ckeller — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:09:30 -0600

A Comparison Across Institutions at Different Stages of IR Development.

The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship

ckeller — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:22:47 -0500

This is a report of a workshop held in Phoenix, Arizona April 17 to 19, 2007. The objective of the workshop was to build on the findings of recent Cyberinfrastructure reports ([ACLS], [CI]) to identify opportunities and strategies for managing information created and used by researchers and scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Participants included representatives from Europe and the US with affiliations in government, higher education, industry, and private foundations.

Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace

drupal — Thu, 03 May 2007 16:47:52 -0500

This article reports on a three-part evaluative study of institutional repositories. We describe the contents and participation in Cornell's DSpace and compare these results with seven university DSpace installations. Through in-depth interviews with eleven faculty members in the sciences, social sciences and humanities, we explore their attitudes, motivations, and behaviors for non-participation in institutional repositories.

Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States MIRACLE Project Research Findings

drupal — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:54:45 -0500

In this report, the authors describe results of a nationwide census of institutional repositories in U.S. academic institutions. The census is one of several activities of the MIRACLE Project, an IMLS-funded research program based at the University of Michigan.

A 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.

Report of the January 2007 ORE-TC Meeting

drupal — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 13:18:22 -0600

A detalied report of the results of the meeting of OAI-ORE Technical Committee describing features and requirements of the ORE model and its context in the Web Architecture.

Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository

drupal — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 16:19:49 -0600

The author proposes a market-oriented approach to increase the rate of deposit to an Institutional Repository.

Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications

drupal — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 12:06:20 -0600

"Institutional repositories (IRs) are proliferating as they become an indispensable component for information and knowledge sharing in the scholarly world [1]. As their numbers increase worldwide, a new phase of IR development is emerging. Moving beyond their initial functions, IRs no longer serve solely as a place to store, organize, and access content. With rapidly changing technologies, users now desire and expect transportable content that can be utilized within various digital environments and reused in multiple formats, and they need forums for the rapid exchange of ideas with both on-campus and external communities. In response, universities and the libraries hosting IRs are looking for ways to weave their repositories into the "information fabric" of their campuses' academic and business processes and catalyze changes in scholarly communications more broadly."

Repository Librarian and the Next Crusade: The Search for a Common Standard for Digital Repository Metadata

drupal — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 14:16:49 -0600

"Metadata is an exceedingly broad category of information covering everything from an object's title and date of origin to information about layout, presentation, and rights. Within libraries and digital object repositories, metadata is the cornerstone of the infrastructure required for exchange and use of information. While metadata standards abound, and acceptance and use of these standards is equally widespread, agreement on a common standard is much harder to find."

Taming the Digital Beast

drupal — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 17:16:20 -0500

"Is your digital institutional repository out of control? It's time to step back and look at contribution, access, rights, storage, and functionality—issues you don't want to monkey with."

Advancing Scholarship and Intellectual Productivity:

drupal — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:02:54 -0500

"Tremendously exciting large-scale digitization projects are opening up cultural memory as embodied in our library special collections, our museums and archives, and the public-domain segment of our published literature to unprecedented levels of access and use."

Digital Repositories in UK universities and colleges

drupal — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 12:31:51 -0600

Sometimes a word acquires so many meanings that it becomes difficult to use clearly. This happened to 'portal', and it may be happening to 'repository'. There is a lot of development work underway that claims to relate to repositories, that might previously have been related to 'archives', 'digital libraries' or 'content management systems'. Defining the boundaries is probably a waste of time, so for the purposes of this article, I'll take a reasonably pragmatic approach, which is to say a repository is a digital object store into which material can be deposited. Repositories therefore offer information professionals a way of becoming more involved in the processes whereby digital information is made shareable, applying their expertise earlier in the information cycle than has often been the case.

Digital Library Initiatives: Next-Gen Libraries

drupal — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:11:10 -0600

As digital repositories continue to evolve, keep your eye on these projects. They may serve as the models for your own digitization initiatives.

Digital Repositories: Helping Universities and Colleges

drupal — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 13:03:12 -0500

Briefing papers on why repositories are important for universities and colleges in helping to manage and capture institutional assets as a part of their information strategy. A digital repository can hold a wide range of materials for a variety of purposes and users. It can support learning, research and administrative processes.

The Role of Reference Librarians in Institutional Repositories

drupal — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 10:56:12 -0500

This paper proposes explaining institutional repositories (IRs) and open access, discussing the relationship of open access to IRs, and examining the possible roles of reference librarians in IRs. Design/methodology/approach - Key IR and open access concepts are clarified and critiqued. New organizational roles for reference libraries are suggested that build on their current functions. Findings - The IR concept is defined, and IRs are shown to be different from scholars' personal web sites, academic department/unit archives, institutional e-print archives, and disciplinary archives. Open access is defined and examined. While the vision of open access is clear, the implementation of the vision is less pure. Open access and IRs are not synonyms: IRs are best seen as an enabling technology for open access. Reference librarians must play a key role in IRs, and ten potential IR support activities for them are identified. Originality/value - This paper orients reference librarians, library administrators, and others to IRs and open access, providing a context for understanding how reference librarians' jobs may be transformed by the emergence of IRs.

Convergence of Libraries, Digital Repositories and Management of Web Content

drupal — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:28:14 -0500

The evolving technologies committee is charged with identifying and monitoring evolving technologies and their impact on higher education institutions. This submission is on digital repositories and the management of web content.

Implementing an Open Jurisdictional Digital Repository - the STORS Project

drupal — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 12:35:29 -0500

This article discusses the development and implementation of an open jurisdictional repository for published electronic material by the State Library of Tasmania, Australia. This repository is called the Stable Tasmanian Open Repository Service (STORS). It operates within the legal deposit provisions of the Tasmanian legislation and includes electronic documents published in Tasmania by government, commercial publishers and individuals. STORS is based on a publisher self-contribution model for content acquisition. The project has focused on the need to ensure easy and reliable contribution of content by publishers, with the provision of additional benefits to encourage use. STORS has been developed in a modular and extensible way, and will be supplemented over time to improve discovery, interoperability and preservation outcomes.

If You Give A Student A Computer: Patrick McElroy Suggests a Win-Win Model for Managing Growing Demand for Digital Learning Content

drupal — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 11:16:41 -0500

One of the NLII's top priorities is the fostering of market structures for the development and delivery of interactive learning materials. The program is focused especially on markets that provide the evaluation, acquisition, distribution, and publication of proprietary, Web-based digital learning materials. Patrick McElroy, founder of Learning Content Exchange and NLII annual meeting 2003 general session speaker, has worked with publishers as well as courseware and technology companies in helping them create business models and distribution strategies for digital content.