Rethinking Institutional Repositories: Innovations in Management, Collections, and Inclusion

"In their early days, IRs were primarily viewed as a means of capturing and disseminating faculty research. Ideally, faculty would directly contribute their publications to the IR, library personnel would assist faculty in securing the rights to post the article publicly if the author no longer maintained the rights to the work, and universities would build out a robust database of the scholarship of all affiliated faculty that would be freely available to researchers locally and around the globe. But librarians built IRs, and faculty did not come, in many cases. In response, many IR managers transitioned to a mediated deposit strategy in which faculty supplied a list of publications and IR staff uploaded the items on the faculty member’s behalf, along with performing all necessary rights-checking. These initiatives generally tended to elicit greater levels of faculty participation but were far more time-consuming for repository staff. While efforts to include faculty publications in the IR continue, these challenges led many to question whether there might be other, stronger use cases for repositories.

In this volume, IR managers are encouraged to reimagine their repositories by considering several innovative approaches to broaden both the types of  content and the level of participation in the repository. As of this writing, much of the existing literature still tends to focus either on the technical aspects of establishing or organizing a repository or on prioritizing programs and efforts to increase the number of faculty articles in the repository.2 This book aims to expand on this scholarship by highlighting a variety of approaches to administering IRs, increasing the variety of repository content, and broadening participation in the IR."