This toolkit contains information, forms, tips, documentation, and templates that you can use and adapt as you start to create an Institutional Repository at your library. The site was designed primarily for an audience of librarians. If you need some introductory information about repositories and scholarly communication for faculty, create change is a good resource.
What is an Institutional Repository?
- A long-term digital archive containing scholarly or artistic work produced by the members of a particular institution.
- It collects and maintains materials like published journal articles, gray literature, lectures, data sets, reports, learning objects, theses, dissertations, undergraduate honors projects and other scholarly works.
- IRs can also preserve materials that document institutional history such as departmental newsletters, meeting minutes, campus publications, or other items that document campus life.
- IRs can preserve many types of materials, including text, images, audio files, video files, and more.
- An IR offers open access to scholarly research to anyone in the world.
- Institutional Repositories may be linked together or aggregated with one searchable interface based on subject interest, type of material, region, or other common factors. For example, the Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations collections include graduate work from around the world.
Introductory Resources
- Logic Model of the Utah Digital Repository
- Scholarly Communication Glossary
- Glossary of Open Access Abbreviations, Acronyms and Terms
Tips for Getting Started
- An Institutional Repository project can initially seem a little intimidating, because there are so many possible items that could be added to an IR.
- Try to focus on one or two projects that could benefit your campus community. Would you like to preserve and make accessible undergraduate research or senior honors projects? Are there campus publications that need to be digitized? Is there a lecture series you would like to record and preserve for the future? Any of these projects could be a great start to an IR at your institution.
