Étiquette : repository management

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 :

« 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

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