From its earliest days, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has explored strategies to unleash the power of the digital networked environment in order to enhance the process of scholarly communication and address the serious economic problems that plague it. During the past year, we have been following the promise and progress of early-stage institutional repositories—digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community. We believe that institutional repositories are a practical, cost-effective, and strategic means for institutions to build partnerships with their faculty to advance scholarly communication.
For a university, this would include materials such as research journal articles, before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it might also include other digital assets generated by normal academic life, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects.
The four main objectives for having an institutional repository are:
to create global visibility for an institution's scholarly research;
to collect content in a single location;
to provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving it;
to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost ("grey") literature (e.g., theses or technical reports).
The origin of the notion of an "institutional repository" [IR] are twofold:
IRs are partly linked to the notion of digital interoperability, which is in turn linked to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and its Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The OAI in turn had its roots in the notion of a "Universal Preprint Service," since superseded by the open access movement.
IRs are partly linked to the notion of a digital library -- i.e., collecting, housing, classifying, cataloguing, curating, preserving, and providing access to digital content, analogous with the library's conventional function of collecting, housing classifying, curating, preserving and providing access to analog content.
There is a mashup indicating the worldwide locations of open access digital repositories. This project is called Repository 66 and is based on data provided by ROAR and the OpenDOAR service developed by the SHERPA. the most popular IR software platforms are Eprints, DSpace, and Bepress.
Essential Elements of an Institutional Repository
Stated broadly and in the context of SPARC's focus, a digital institutional repository can be any collection of digital material hosted, owned or controlled, or disseminated by a college or university, irrespective of purpose or provenance.
Other types of institutions that generate substantial bodies of research or other intellectual property could establish repositories as well. These might include government departments or agencies, non-governmental or inter-governmental organizations, museums, independent research organizations, federations of societies, and (theoretically at least) commercial entities—any organization that wishes to capture and openly disseminate its intellectual product, thus contributing to scientific/scholarly discourse and benefiting from the resulting organizational visibility.
Here, however, we will narrow our definition to focus on a particular type of institutional repository—a 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, with few if any barriers to access. In other words, the content of an institutional repository is:
· Institutionally defined;
· Scholarly;
· Cumulative and perpetual; and
· Open and interoperable.
Institutional repositories can serve another function currently served by print journals: that of registering the priority of ideas and intellectual property. By removing the physical page constraints that pertain in print, digital publishing expands the amount of worthy research that can be made available for review. In this way, institutional repositories provide a venue for a greater proportion of researchers to register their work in a recognized forum. Another
Besides the benefits for faculty as authors, institutional repositories also deliver benefits to teaching faculty. By including non-ephemeral faculty-produced teaching material, the repository serves as a resource supporting classroom teaching. These materials might include concept illustrations, visualizations, models, course videos, and the like—much of the material often found on course web sites. This benefit should help extend the appeal of institutional repositories across a broader audience of research and teaching faculty.
Conclusion:
Institutional repositories offer a strategic response both to the opportunities of the digital networked environment and the systemic problems in the today's scholarly journal system. This response can be applied immediately, reaping both short-term and on-going benefits for universities and their faculty and advancing the transformation of scholarly communication over the long term.
DSpace
DSpace is an open source software package that provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly used as the basis for an institutional repository. It supports a wide variety of data, including books, theses, 3D digital scans of objects, photographs, film, video, research data sets and other forms of content. The data is arranged as community collections of items, which bundle bitstreams together.
DSpace is also intended as a platform for digital preservation activities. Since its release in 2002, as a product of the HP-MIT Alliance, it has been installed and is in production at over 240 institutions around the globe from large universities to small higher education colleges, cultural organizations, and research centers. It is shared under a BSD licence, which enables users to customize or extend the software as needed.
History:
The first version of DSpace was released in November 2002, following a joint effort by developers from MIT and HP Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In March 2004 the first DSpace User Group Meeting (DSUG) took place at Hotel@MIT, and it was there that the first discussions concerning the DSpace community and its future governance were discussed in earnest. The DSpace Federation formed a loose grouping of interested institutions, while the DSpace Committers group was formed shortly after, consisting of five developers from HP Labs, MIT, OCLC, University of Cambridge, and University of Edinburgh. Later two further developers from Australian National University and Texas A&M University also joined this group. DSpace 1.3 was released in 2005, and at around the same time the second DSpace User Group Meeting was held at the University of Cambridge. Following this, two further smaller user group meetings were spawned, the first in January/February 2006 in Sydney, and the second in April 2006 in Bergen, Norway. In March 2008, the DSpace Community released DSpace 1.5.
DSpace Foundation:
On July 17, 2007, HP and MIT jointly announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide leadership and support for the DSpace community
Technology:
DSpace is written in Java and JSP, using the Java Servlet API. It uses a relational database, and supports the use of PostgreSQL and Oracle. It makes its holdings available primarily via a web interface, but it also supports the OAI-PMH v2.0, and is capable of exporting METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) packages. Future versions are likely to see increasing use of web services, and changes to the user interface layer.
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