Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite - Digital.pdfVIP

Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Digital Scholarship / Copyright 2008 © Charles W. Bailey, Jr. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit /licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Introduction Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite is designed to give the reader a very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites. What Is an Institutional Repository? There are a number of definitions for institutional repository (IR). Here are a few key ones: Clifford Lynch, Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age In my view, a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.1 Mark Ware, Pathfinder Research on Web-based Repositories An institutional repository (IR) is defined to be a web-based database (repository) of scholarly material which is institutionally defined (as opposed to a subject-based repository); cumulative and perpetual (a collection of record); open and interoperable (e.g. using OAI-compliant software); and thus collects, stores a