Institutional Repositories

This study shares the results of an effort to understand the needs and goals of future institutional repository (IR) users at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB). Due to underutilization of IRs at other institutions, the University Libraries at UCB decided it was imperative that insight into users' goals and needs of an IR be gained before design of the repository began. The libraries partnered with faculty and students with expertise in human-computer interaction to study user needs. The results of this study yielded "personas" describing different classes of potential IR users on university campuses, which can be used to guide IR architects in designing repositories that facilitate increased participation.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undertook a one-year pilot study to investigate advances in institutional repository (IR) development. The aim was to learn about successes and challenges experienced by IR initiatives at university libraries that had made a substantial commitment to developing and sustaining an IR. Three sites were studied using the comparative case study method. They were purposefully selected to represent varying approaches to IR development undertaken at research libraries with similar missions and users.

This UKRDS interim report is an early draft from the feasibility stage of the consultancy prepared for the UKRDS Steering Committee. It is intended as a working draft of the Feasibility Study report scheduled for completion in early August 2008. As such it reflects ongoing work and analysis and is subject to further changes and review. It has been produced to inform the steering committee of outcomes to date and solicit their feedback on key issues for the UKRDS feasibility study project.

The interim report includes an initial analysis of the survey carried out of some 700 researchers at the four case study sites (see Appendix A), regarding their current storage provision and future requirements.

Each case study site also provided information from their IT and Support Services regarding the services view of research funding and provision of data storage. From this, we have extracted some trends in the growth of data storage requirements and the planned provision to meet these requirements.

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;

Storing digital data is becoming more essential to the work of librarians, who are trying to think in terms of the next 100 years — a virtual eternity in computer time.

Recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step.  The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the university’s digital repository and that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University.

Library and IT staff collaborated with various academic offices to create an online submission system and repository for required undergraduate interactive and major qualifying projects. Project reports are required to be submitted online. This presentation will review the submission process, repository, documentation, tutorials, and user education.