The intellectual capital of any organization is represented by the scholarly publications & research material. In a developing country like India there are many academic and research organizations. With shortage of resource materials available to these organizations, it is imperative that the available materials be preserved and made visible to all professionals in various streams of academic or research areas.
Institutional Digital Repositories are emerging technologies for knowledge sharing and management in academic and research institutions, which can help facilitate reform of the scholarly communication system. Institutional Digital Repositories help collect, preserve, index and distribute knowledge intensive research material and scholarly publications of faculties, researcher and students in any academic or research institute. Institutional Digital Repositories contain articles, research papers, theses and dissertations, published and unpublished research materials, peer reviewed works, etc., depending upon the purpose for which the repository was created.
Availability of Open Source System Software’s has facilitated the setting up of repositories. The commonly used open source software’s for creation of the Institutional Digital Repository are DSpace and EPrints, others being MyCoRe, Fedora, Greenstone, Archimede, ARNO, CDSware, Tor, and OPUS.
An institutional repository consists of formally organized and managed collections of digital content generated by faculty, staff and students at an institution. The content of these repositories can be available for integration with on-campus library and course management systems, and can also be made available to colleagues and students at other institutions, as well as to the general public.
When we use the term “repositories” today, we can be speaking about one of many different technologies that support the storage and distribution of digital content:
- Collection-based digital repositories which are managed by library professionals
- Course management system and associated file stores
- Collection of research data and reports managed by academic departments
- Institutional file storage system
- Digital asset management workflow systems
- Web content management systems used by institutions or departments to store and stage web content
While many of these components can play roles in capturing and managing digital content, an institutional repository is a more specific concept – a centrally managed collection of institutionally-generated digital objects designed to be maintained in perpetuity. An institutional repository will be capable of indexing and serving a wide range of static and moving images, and will be seamlessly visible from course management system, integrated library systems, administrative workflow systems, and via public portals. Institutional repositories can be viewed “as a natural extension of academic institutions’ responsibility as generators of primary research seeking to preserve and leverage their constituents’ intellectual assets; and as one potentially major component in the evolving structure of scholarly communication.”
Importance
- Digital preservation of the documents using IDR
- Online access for the Institutional Research publications
- A user friendly Information Retrieval System
- Multi-user access facility at the same time
- A better service to institution’s learning community
- Contributing to the reform of the entire Institution of scholarly communication and publishing
- Reducing user dependence on Library’s print collection
- A solution to the problem of preserving Institution’s intellectual output
- Opportunities for new forms of scholarly communication
- Flexible ways to develop existing scholarly communications
History
Repositories began with man’s first storing and protection of artifacts and information succeeded by the formalization of those efforts through libraries and museums. In 1988, Peter Drucker’s 1988 Harvard Business Review article “The Coming of the New Organization” declared that an organization’s knowledge was its most important asset and to manage that asset well was to ensure the organization’s success. Thus began the knowledge management movement of the 1990’s that reached beyond book and article “containers” and placed value on all knowledge explicit and tacit, in datasets and graphics, in e-mails and sketches. By 2000, it was becoming easier for individuals and groups to create and disseminate content using desktop tools and networking which challenged universities to coordinate, share, and preserve its digital assets. In 2002, two seminal events occurred when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) collaborated with Hewlett-Packard Corporation to launch an open-source Institutional Digital Repository entitled DSpace and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) published, “The Case for IDRs: A SPARC Position Paper. From DSpace emerged a new strategy for universities to capture their creativity and research as well as pose an alternative to the high-costs of scholarly communication. In 2003, with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and other sources, MIT's DSpace was replicated and the software released under an open source arrangement, greatly lowering cost and expediting development. While the MIT software is not the only option available (e.g., University of Southampton in the U.K. (http:// www.eprints.org), it has become the most general-purpose. The synergy of the Internet, the decrease in online storage costs, and the development of standards set the stage for Institutional Digital Repository experimentation and eventual implementation.
What can we store in a Repository?
The focus of this study is to enable repository services that support storage of,
- Academic publications: articles (published articles in journals, magazines and newspapers; peer-reviewed, copyright approved post-print articles; pre-print materials related to published peer-reviewed articles), books, book sections (including conference proceedings and abstracts)
- Theses and dissertations: Doctoral theses, Masters theses and dissertations
- Grey literature: patents (published only), technical reports, software, project reports, internet publication, documentation and manuals, working and discussion papers, non peer-reviewed conference and workshop materials (posters and speech/lecture materials)
- Audio visual items: images, shows/exhibitions, performances, compositions, talk
Benefits
There are many benefits of the IDR such as
- The visibility of the academic output will be increased
- A repository enables the institute to publish its own scientific research and to make it available to all of its researchers
- The quality of the institute’s intellectual output can be disseminated effectively and efficiently
- Facilitates improved research collaboration
- Preserves and provides long-term access to the scholars’ research output
- Make possible easy access to Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD). However only print version of theses, dissertations were available a few years back
- It has a safe, backed-up and secure place to store institution scholarly works
- It can be access 24 hours a day
- More than one person can access a particular document at the same time
- Provide new opportunities for the archiving and preservation of valuable digital works
- Reduce duplication of records and inconsistencies in multiple instances of the same works
- Provides a global platform for local research and hence improved visibility
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