The Use of Institutional Repositories: The Ohio State University Experience :
« All institutional repositories face the issue of content recruitment. The fact that we speak of recruitment rather than collection development implies that non-librarians or
non-archivists have a major role in what goes into the repository and by extension, what is preserved. However, for many universities librarians and/or archivists set the selection policy for the institutional repository. This selective approach enables the library and archives to decide where to commit tight resources for long term preservation and maintenance. However, such policies have the potential to diminish a sense of ownership and participation among other units on campus, thus making the
repository more a library/archives project than an institutional initiative.
The goals for the institutional repository (IR) determine its content. The concept of the “Knowledge Bank” at the Ohio State University began with a high level University task
force on distance learning. After a year of work, this task force approached the then Director of Libraries, Joseph J. Branin, with a conceptual model for better managing and using the intellectual digital assets of the institution. This history of interest beyond the Libraries has influenced greatly the goals, policies, and management of the Knowledge Bank. The responsibility for getting content is a distributed one. From its inception the Knowledge Bank was seen as a project of the University and not of the Libraries. The role of the Libraries is one of knowledge management providing hardware, software, training and support to entities on campus wanting to make available their digital assets. Many collections originate with subject specialists from the Libraries and Archives but there are also many collections that originate outside the Libraries and Archives.
« In the summer of 2009 the staffs of the Libraries and the Archives discussed ways to increase collaboration between the two units and to tag content contributed by end-user
communities that is also within the scope of the Archives. An offshoot result was the desire to know more about the use of IR content. In this paper the author examines the use of digital materials that have been deposited in The Ohio State University (OSU) Knowledge Bank (KB) from three perspectives: 1) Are there differences in the frequency of use of materials identified by the archives as within scope of their
collections and all other materials in the Knowledge Bank? 2) Are there differences in the frequency of use among categories of sources for content? Categories of sources examined are academic units, research centers, support units and informal communities. 3) Are there differences in the frequency of use among different types of content? Type refers to the nature of the materials; text and moving-image are examples of two of the twenty types of materials examined. »
URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2010/07/23/crl-134rl.short?rss=1