Institutional Repositories - Need, Purpose, Types and Tools;              Institutional Repositories in India: ROAR, DOAR, SHARPA-ROMIO 

  Institutional Repositories                                                                   

 Clifford Lynch (2003) "a set of services that a university / institution offers to the member of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organisational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including, long-term preservation where appropriate as well as  organization and access of distribution". 

 According to mark ware an institutional repositories (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 - complaint software) and thus collects, stores and disseminates (is part of the process of scholarly communication). In addition, most would include long-term preservation of digital material as a key functions of IRs". 

 According to Barton and Walker of MIT Libraries "Institutional Repositories designed to manage, host preserve and enable distribution of the scholarly out put of an institution."  

According to charles Bailey's "An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving and disseminating, in digital form, the intellectual output of an institution  particularly a research institution." 

 An Institutional Repository (IR) is a digital collections or archives of a university's intellectual output. Universities and other institutions are producing digital information base of their Ph D theses and dissertation, articles, reports conference proceedings, lecture notes, presentational, audio video records using open source software and making them available to their end users. There are 92 institutional and subject wise repositories have been registered in Registry of Open Access Repository (ROAR), Institutional repositories initiated in India can be viewed at http://roar.eprints.org/ 

    Need of Institutional Repositories                                                    

 The building of a institutional repository for academic libraries is need in the present scenario of digital world because of the following changes and drawbacks 

 1. Technological change  

 2. Significant increase in the overall volume of research 

 3. Increasing need for archival and access to impublished information. 

 4. Increasing demand to access knowledge objects from anywhere at any time. 

 5. Increasing uncertainty over who will handle the preservation archiving of digital scholarly research materials. 

 Purpose/objectives of institutional Repositories                                 

 1. Institutional Repository in created to manage, preserve and maintain the digital assets, intellectual output, and histories of academic institutions. 

 2. Create global visibility for an institution's scholarly research. 

 3. To collect content in single location. 

 4. To provide open access to the institution's research output. 

 5. To provide self-archiving of institudional scholarly research output. 

  Types of Institutional Repositories                                                     

Institutional repositories generally can be divided into the following three categories. 

 a. Institutional Repository : 

An institutional or department repository target to host and provide access to the resources related to or produced by a particular department or institule. Institution specific repositories contain all the out puts and resources owned by and related to the institution itself. 

 b. Discipline Institutional Repository :  

An Institutional repository that hosts the resources deals with a subject or discipline or a particular type of resource. This type of IRs are confined to specific subject field of interest and meant for preserving and storing the scholarly knowledge on a particular  subject but not affiliated to any institudes,  giving the ample scope to expose more in the respective subject. 

 c. Aggregator : 

A repository that collect the resources from other institutional repositories.

  Components for creating institutional Repositories                          

 Creating and develop a institutional repositories are mainly based on hardware and staff requirements. 

 • Hardware : Hardware required can be a simple desktop computer workstation, or a file server. 

 • Software : There are many open source software package for running a  institutional repository (i.e. DSpace, E-Prints, Fedora, Greenstone, Archimede etc.) commercial software's are Berkeley Electronic Press and simple DL. 

 • Staff requirement : The developments in ICTs as smartened library professionals in taking leadership roles in planning and building institutional repositories, fulfilling their role as exports in collecting, describing presering and providing. However, staff requirements vary according to the institutions ambitions for repository. Some of the main jobs are involved in institution repository are formulating content policies, advocacy of software and hardware using, user training and a liaison with a wide range of institutional departments and external contacts, technical implementation, customization and management of repository software, manage fields and quality, creates usage repots and tracks the preservation issues. 

 Elements of Institutional Repositories                                                

 As the digital institutional repository can be any collection of digital meterial hosted, owned on controlled and disseminate by any institution irrespective of purposes as per the functions and objectives of parent organization. A digital archive of the intellectual product by the students, faculty and research students of an institution and it should be accessible to end user without boundaries. The content of an institutional repositorie are :  

1. Pre-Prints of articles or research reports submitted for publication. 

 2. The text of journal articles accepted for publication. 

 3. Revised texts of published work with comments from academic readers. 

 4. Conference papers. 

 5. Teaching materials. 

 6. Students projects. 

 7. Datasets resulting from research projects. 

 8. Committee reports and memoranda 

 9. Photographs and video recording. 

 10. Computer software. 

 11. Technical documentation 

 12. Svrveys etc. 

  Institutional Repositories in India                                                     

 i. ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) :  

ROAR is a parallel project to open DOAR and runs at southampton university in the UK. According to its website (http://trac.eprints.org/projects/ iar/wiki). ROAR aims to promote open access to the research literature present post-peer-review through authors self-archiving in institutional eprint archives. Open access to research maximises research access and there by also research impact, making research more productive and effective. 

 This registry has two functions :  

a. to monitor overall growth in the number of eprint archives and  

b. to maintain a list of GNU, EPrints sites (the software southampton university has designed to facilitate self - archiving) 

ROAR also keeps track of the archiving policies adopted by universities, funding bodies and so on. 

 ii. DOAR - Directory of Open Access Repositories 

 As given on its webside (http://www.open doar.org/about.html) the open DOAR service "provides a quality-assured listing of open access repositories around the world open DOAR staff harvest and assign metadata to allow categorisation and analysis to assist the wider use and, exploitation of repositories. Each of the repositories has been visited by open DOAR staff to ensure a high degree of quality and consistency in the information provided : open DOAR is maintained by SHERPA. The work of the open DOAR team at nottingham university in the UK is finded by a number of organisations including the OSI, the JISC, the consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) and SPARC Europe. There are currently 1300 repositories covered by open DOAR. 

 iii. SHERPA - RoMEO 

 The original SHERPA partnership was formed for the SHERPA project (2002-2006) and drew from research-led universities with an active interest in establishing an example of a then new concept an open access institutional repository.  

SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open access institutional repositories in universites to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. SHERPA services and the SHERPA partnership are both based at the centre for Research communication at the university of Nottingham. SHERPA services include :  

• RoMEO - Publisher's copyright and archiving policies. 

 • JULIET - Research funder's archiving mandates and guideline. 

 • Open DOAR worldwide directory of open access repositories. 

 • SHERPA Search - Simple full text search of uk repositories. 

 iv. JISC and institutional repositories :  

The JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk) is funded by the UK higher education (HE) and further education (FE) bodies to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research. 

 v. Focus on Access to institutional Repositories (FAIR) : 

This programme (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ whatwedo/ programmer/fair.aspx) starded with a call for proposals in February 2002 which asked for projects to "support access to and sharing of institutional content within HE and FE and to allow intelligence to be gathered about the technical organisational and cultural challenges of these processes.

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