Best practices and policies in institutional repositories development: The Ktisis case

Libraries worldwide have realized the importance of institutional repositories in the intellectual life and output of an institution. Institutional repositories are now clearly recognized as essential infrastructure in the digital world. An institutional repository is a means for the institutions to manage the product of their academic research and to increase accessibility to that product. Generally, institutional repository development is still in the process of establishing guiding principles and best practices, through established cases which can be used to learn development options and risks.

This paper begins with a brief description of the implementation process of Ktisis, the open access institutional repository of the Cyprus University of Technology, and continues to describe the set of activities used in the strategic plan of Ktisis. Among those activities was the definition of the promotional plan, the engagement in the international community and the definition of the Ktisis policy of use.

URL : http://ktisis.cut.ac.cy/handle/10488/4837

Institutional Repositories Long Term Preservation and the changing…

Institutional Repositories, Long Term Preservation and the changing nature of Scholarly Publications :

“The web offers new opportunities for scholars to publish the outcome of their research. One of these new forms is called Enhanced Publications. In an Enhanced Publication different objects and files that has a meaningful and close relation to each other are aggregated on the level of a resource map in witch not only the separate files are described, but also the relation between those files are. An example of an Enhanced Publication is a digital text publication and a dataset on which the publication is based. Preserving these compound entities in the existing infrastructures raises new issues. This article discusses these issues against the background of the Dutch long term preservation infrastructure and organisation.”

URL : http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/1764/1851

Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation Assessing Current Practices…

Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation: Assessing Current Practices at Research Libraries :

“In spring 2010, authors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted a national survey on digital preservation of Institutional Repository (IR) materials among Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions. Examining the current practices of digital preservation of IR materials, the survey of 72 research libraries reveals the challenges and opportunities of implementing digital preservation for IRs in a complex environment with rapidly evolving technology, practices, and standards. Findings from this survey will inform libraries about the current state of digital preservation for IRs.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may11/yuanli/05yuanli.html

Digital repositories and the future of preservation and use of scientific knowledge

Information and communication technology has a great influence on scientific communication and work of scientists. Ways in which research is conducted have changed; science has become more highly collaborative; network-based, and data-intensive. The existing system of scientific publishing is experiencing pressure for change under the influence of the exponential growth of information production, the dramatic increase in subscription fees, the increasing storage cost of printed documents, and the increasing power and availability of digital technology.

To conduct their research more effectively scientists need modern resources of digital information which would support their endeavor. Digital repository is one such type of information resources. Digital repository is an institutional digital archive of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff, and students of an institution and accessible to end users both within and outside of the institution.

Digital repositories carry a great potential for the advancement of scientific research. Digital repositories can store different file formats and types of content. An institutional digital repository can contain e-prints of scientific papers, research data, but also e-learning materials and other forms of institutional intellectual outputs. As the number of open access digital repositories grows, it has become evident that institutional repositories are now clearly and broadly being recognized as essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital world.

URL : http://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=clanak&id_clanak_jezik=99976

Institutional Repositories Features Architecture Design and Implementation Technologies…

Institutional Repositories: Features, Architecture, Design and Implementation Technologies :

“Europe is the leading continent in terms of active adoption and use of Digital Libraries – particularly Institutional Repositories (IRs). Africa has not done poorly in this area with a steady increase from 19 repositories in 2008 to 46 in January, 2011 but there is need to raise awareness and channel efforts towards making IRs easily accessible to Africans through ubiquitous channels such as hand-helds and mobile devices. This paper reviews the features, architecture, design and implementation technologies of IRs. In addition, it highlights viable research areas that can be pursued by African researchers in the field of Digital Libraries. It also encourages research efforts to focus on areas that will be beneficial to Africa.”

URL : http://eprints.covenantuniversity.edu.ng/108/

DataStaR A Data Sharing and Publication Infrastructure to…

DataStaR: A Data Sharing and Publication Infrastructure to Support Research :

“DataStaR, a Data Staging Repository (http://datastar.mannlib.cornell.edu/) in development at Cornell University’s Albert R. Mann Library (Ithaca, New York USA), is intended to support collaboration and data sharing among researchers during the research process, and to promote publishing or archiving data and high-quality metadata to discipline-specific data centers and/or institutional repositories. Researchers may store and share data with selected colleagues, select a repository for data publication, create high quality metadata in the formats required by external repositories and Cornell’s institutional repository, and obtain help from data librarians with any of these tasks. To facilitate cross-domain interoperability and flexibility in metadata management, we employ semantic web technologies as part of DataStaR’s metadata infrastructure. This paper describes the overall design of the system, the work to date with Cornell researchers and their data sets, and possibilities for extending DataStaR for use in international agriculture research..

URL : http://journals.sfu.ca/iaald/index.php/aginfo/article/view/199

Trends of the Institutional Repositories on Agricultural Universities…

Trends of the Institutional Repositories on Agricultural Universities in Japan :

This paper discusses the present status of institutional repositories in Agricultural Universities in Japan as found in a survey conducted in January 2010. There are over seventy of agricultural universities in Japan which include the broad areas related to agriculture such as the faculty and graduate schools of Agriculture, Veterinary Medicine, Life Science, Fisheries Sciences, Agricultural Resource Sciences, Horticulture, Marine Science and Technology, Textile Science and Technology, and Environmental Studies. The experimental project of institutional repositories was started in 2004 and since then, over 100 universities have joined the National Institute of Informatics Institutional Repositories Program. The contents of institutional repositories consist of journal articles, dissertations, bulletins, meeting articles, documents for meetings, books, technical reports, magazine articles, preprints, learning materials, data/datasets, software and other materials. The number and type of contents of institutional repositories differ between each agricultural university. The future direction of institutional repositories of agricultural universities in Japan is also discussed and concludes the paper.

URL : http://journals.sfu.ca/iaald/index.php/aginfo/article/view/202