Staffing and Workflow of a Maturing Institutional Repository…

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Staffing and Workflow of a Maturing Institutional Repository :

“Institutional repositories (IRs) have become established components of many academic libraries. As an IR matures it will face the challenge of how to scale up its operations to increase the amount and types of content archived. These challenges involve staffing, systems, workflows, and promotion. In the past eight years, Kansas State University’s IR (K-REx) has grown from a platform for student theses, dissertations, and reports to also include faculty works. The initial workforce of a single faculty member was expanded as a part of a library-wide reorganization, resulting in a cross-departmental team that is better able to accommodate the expansion of the IR. The resultant need to define staff responsibilities and develop resources to manage the workflows has led to the innovations described here, which may prove useful to the greater library community as other IRs mature.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/4/

Institutional Repositories Exploration of Costs and Value …

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Institutional Repositories: Exploration of Costs and Value :

“Little is known about the costs academic libraries incur to implement and manage institutional repositories and the value these institutional repositories offer to their communities. To address this, the authors report the findings of their 29 question survey of academic libraries with institutional repositories. We received 49 usable responses. Thirty-four of these responses completed the entire survey. While meant to be exploratory, results are varied and depend on the context of the institution. This context includes, among other things, the size of the repositories and of the institutions, the software used to operate the repositories, such as open source or proprietary, and whether librarians mediate content archiving, or content producers directly deposit their own material. The highlights of our findings, based on median values, suggest that institutions that mediate submissions incur less expense than institutions that allow self-archiving, institutions that offer additional services incur greater annual operating costs than those who do not, and institutions that use open source applications have lower implementation costs but comparable annual operating costs with institutions that use proprietary solutions. Furthermore, changes in budgeting, from special initiative to absorption into the regular budget, suggest a trend in sustainable support for institutional repositories. Our findings are exploratory but suggest that future inquiry into costs and the value of institutional repositories should be directed at specific types of institutions, such as by Carnegie Classification category.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january13/burns/01burns.html

Building an Open Data Repository for a Specialized Research Community: Process, Challenges and Lessons

In 2009, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University began building an open access digital collection of social science experimental data, metadata, and associated files produced by ISPS researchers.

The digital repository was created to support the replication of research findings and to enable further data analysis and instruction. Content is submitted to a rigorous process of quality assessment and normalization, including transformation of statistical code into R, an open source statistical software.

Other requirements included: (a) that the repository be integrated with the current database of publications and projects publicly available on the ISPS website; (b) that it offered open access to datasets, documentation, and statistical software program files; (c) that it utilized persistent linking services and redundant storage provided within the Yale Digital Commons infrastructure; and (d) that it operated in accordance with the prevailing standards of the digital preservation community.

In partnership with Yale’s Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI), the ISPS Data Archive was launched in the fall of 2010.

We describe the process of creating the repository, discuss prospects for similar projects in the future, and explain how this specialized repository fits into the larger digital landscape at Yale.

URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/222

An activity based costing model for long term…

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An activity-based costing model for long-term preservation and dissemination of digital research data: the case of DANS :

“Financial sustainability is an important attribute of a trusted, reliable digital repository. The authors of this paper use the case study approach to develop an activity-based costing (ABC) model. This is used for estimating the costs of preserving digital research data and identifying options for improving and sustaining relevant activities. The model is designed in the environment of the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) institute, a well-known trusted repository. The DANS–ABC model has been tested on empirical cost data from activities performed by 51 employees in frames of over 40 different national and international projects. Costs of resources are being assigned to cost objects through activities and cost drivers. The ‘euros per dataset’ unit of costs measurement is introduced to analyse the outputs of the model. Funders, managers and other decision-making stakeholders are being provided with understandable information connected to the strategic goals of the organisation. The latter is being achieved by linking the DANS–ABC model to another widely used managerial tool—the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). The DANS–ABC model supports costing of services provided by a data archive, while the combination of the DANS–ABC with a BSC identifies areas in the digital preservation process where efficiency improvements are possible.”

URL : http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-012-0092-1

Evaluation of Three Open Source Software in Terms…

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Evaluation of Three Open Source Software in Terms of Managing Repositories of Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Comparison Study :

“Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), as a new generation of scholarship resources, are gradually increasing in number and quality at higher academic institutions. Meanwhile, by introducing various types of software solutions for managing Institutional Repositories (IRs), selection of appropriate solutions has become a timeconsuming process for institutions. The goal of this paper was to appraise 59 features of three widely utilized open source IR solutions (DSpace, EPrints, Fedora) from the perspective of managing ETDs, via an in-depth evaluation of their important functionalities in this regard. For this purpose, all applications were installed and the features were tested in a test-bed environment (a benchmark machine) with a predefined set of ETD collections and registered users. Findings related to assessment of each feature were presented in the tabular format. Our comparison indicated that, although all three solutions are capable of managing ETD systems, in most of the comparative areas that are vital for an ETD repository DSpace was ahead of EPrints and Fedora.”

URL : http://goo.gl/5skl9

Jarrow Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Software Collecting…

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Jarrow, Electronic Thesis, and Dissertation Software :

“Collecting and disseminating theses and dissertations electronically is not a new concept. Tools and platforms have emerged to handle various components of the submission and distribution process. However, there is not a tool that handles the entirety of the process from the moment the student begins work on their thesis to the dissemination of the final thesis. The authors have created such a tool which they have called Jarrow. After reviewing available open-source software for theses submission and open-source institutional repository software this paper discusses why and how Jarrow was created and how it works. Jarrow can be downloaded and the project followed at http://code.library.unbc.ca .”

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/7486