D-Lib Magazine

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.

A Comparison Across Institutions at Different Stages of IR Development.

The Web puzzle of online information resources often hinders end-users from effective and efficient access to these resources. Clustering resources into appropriate subject-based groupings may help alleviate these difficulties, but will it work with heterogeneous material? The University of Michigan and the University of California Irvine joined forces to test automatically enhancing metadata records using the Topic Modeling algorithm on the varied OAIster corpus. We created labels for the resulting clusters of metadata records, matched the clusters to an in-house classification system, and developed a prototype that would showcase methods for search and retrieval using the enhanced records. Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources.

The key to a successful repository is sustained deposits, and the key to sustained deposits is community engagement. This article looks at deposit profiles automatically generated from OAI harvesting information and argues that repositories characterised by occasional large-volume deposits are a sign of a failure to embed in institutional processes. The ideal profile for a successful repository is discussed, and a new service that ranks repositories based on these criteria is implemented.

"An institutional repository (IR) is an electronic system that captures, preserves, and provides access to the digital work products of a community . In a university setting, an IR may provide a place for faculty work, student theses and dissertations, e-journals, datasets and so on. Whatever the particular focus of the university IR, to be successful it must be filled with scholarly work of enduring value that is searched and cited."