Making the Case for Institutional Repositories
Amsterdam 10 – 11 May 2005
The conference was hosted by SURF[1] as a joint venture with Joint Information Services Committee (UK) and Coalition for Networked Information (North America). Participants from thirteen countries came mostly from the European Community, USA and Britain. Kerry Blinco and John Shipp represented Australia.
The conference commenced with brief reports from seven countries. Predictably, the issues were much the same as in Australia. Most of the focus in Europe, UK and USA still seems to be on text material mostly journal publications and theses. There appears to be an emerging interest in data sets which are not predominantly textual but this is not particularly strong at the moment.
The country surveys highlighted that:
· there is considerable interest in institutional repositories
· inclusion of items in repositories remains relatively low
· respondents to the survey were unclear what constituted an ‘institutional repository’
· concern for the sustainability of either the content or the repository is overwhelmed by the desire to ingest content
· the most commonly represented contents are journal articles and theses
Issues
· need for rich metadata
· greater interaction with academics required –repositories still largely the preserve of librarians
· should repositories be restricted to full objects (some universities are just including metadata of print objects)
· interoperabi1ity between major repository systems should be supported
· version control of objects needs refining
· should a body be established to enable a more rapid development of standards for repositories – not universally accepted by the meeting as desirable
Each of the countries participating in the conference was asked to undertake a survey of institutional repository activities. The survey instrument was not particularly well developed and allowed considerable scope for variant interpretations. Less than half of the CAUL members responded and some of the information was derived from library websites.
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COUNTRY UPDATE on academic INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES
1 / Name of country: AUSTRALIA2 / Institutional Repositories (IR)
a) number of IR’s in your country:
Articles = 7
Theses = 27
Books = 1
Primary data = 1
Video, music etc = 0
Course material = 1 (this excludes repositories of items scanned for student course reading which are maintained by all universities)
Other = 0
b) number of universities in your country:
39
c) average number of documents per IR:
Articles = 615 ( range 121 – 2445); total = 4,305
Theses = 157 (range 6 – 639); total = 3,897
Books = 350
Primary data = 42,416
Video, music etc = 0
Course material = 10 (not including repositories of student readings generally have 2- 3,000 documents each or a total of 76,000 nationally)
Other = 0
d) Coverage of all IR’s related to type of material (average in % of total records; sum=100%)
These are somewhat meaningless percentages as they do not take account of the size of the objects in the various repositories. Student course readings repositories have been excluded.
Articles = 8.45%
Thesis = 7.65%
Books = 0.69%
Primary data = 83.22%
Video, music etc = 0%
Course material = 0.09%
Other, namely: 0
e) Academics having delivered material to the IR
· Total number: not known
· Percentage of total academics: not known
f) Number of IR software packages used:
GNU EPrints = 7
DSpace = 3
Fedora = 3
HarvestRoad Hive = 1
Virginia Tech(modified for theses) = 27
DigitTool (Ex Libris) = 1
g) Can you estimate the typical disciplinary coverage in the IR’s in your country?
· HSS: Humanities and Social Sciences: …. 49%
· LS: Life Sciences: … 19%
· NS: Natural Sciences: … 17%
· Engineering: …. 9%
· Performing Arts: …..3%
· Other: …… 3%
h) Broad national coverage of yearly research output per discipline which is entered into IR’s
Not known
· HSS: Humanities and Social Sciences: …. %
· LS: Life Sciences: … %
· NS: Natural Sciences: … %
· Engineering: …. %
3 / Does your country have a national policy on IR’s? No
If yes, please give some details
Open Access Statement adopted by Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee supports institutional repositories.
http://www.
4 / Have some universities in your country adopted language in their mission statements or overall institutional policy documents that promote scholarly communication through IR’s? Yes
If yes, please give some details
Growing number of universities have, or intend to, mandate the deposit of theses in an institutional repository.
The Queensland University of Technology has policy requiring the submission of works published by academic staff in the institutional repository.
5 / Does your country have an overall national (or regional) organization or programme stimulating IR’s
If yes, please give some details
Yes
Federal Department of Education, Science and Training has provided funding for demonstrator projects related to institutional repositories as part of a Systemic Infrastructure Initiative for higher education.
6 / Do you have a national body, which certifies IR’s according to a certain standard? No
(If yes, please give some details)
7 / a) What kind of services have been build upon the IR’s in your country?
(please give a short description and url)
· ARROW consortium (Monash University; Swinburne University, National Library and University of NSW) are developing the FEDORA software in conjunction with VTLS to provide (www.arrow.edu.au)
· University of Queensland has developed a portal which allows searching across various eprint repositories within the university.
· University of Sydney has developed a print-on-demand facility to publish items from its monograph repository.
· University of Melbourne has developed statistics software for its eprints.org repository
· APSR consortium (Australian National University, National Library, University of Queensland, University of Sydney, Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing) is developing guidelines and middleware related to the data sustainability of institutional repositories
· Australian Digital Theses (ADT) provides opportunity to expose theses
b) Which one(s) are the most successful?
ADT has grown from 7 to 27 contributing institutions and is sustained without grant funding
Too early to judge success of other projects.
8 / Do you have any other kind of harvesting and interoperable activities in practice?
(please give a short description and url)
Most rely on harvesting of metadata via OAI-PMH into harvesters such as OAIster, Google and Google Scholar
University of Queensland harvest from internal repositories to populate ‘UQ Research Finder’
Theses metadata harvested from institutional repositories by an OAI-PMH harvested at University of NSW
National Library has developed harvester for the ARROW project – currently operative for eprint.org repositories but will extend to FEDORA and other repositories
9 / What are/were the most important stimulators for establishing, filling and maintaining IR’s
(please explain)
The following is a compilation of responses from institutions, not an agreed national list.
· return on investment devoted to the creation of IP resources
· non-duplication of resources
· re-use and sharing of teaching and learning objects
· compliance with rights legislation
· risk mitigation
· identification of institutional benefits when identifying appropriate content
· advocacy campaigns
· well thought out and transparently simple submission processes and content formats
· University Library providing leadership, operational and quality control to the university
· Support from Research Office/Committee to showcase institutional research output
· forecast changes to the national research assessment process
· Government policy relating to commercialization of IP led to general awareness that IP has value even if it is not commercialized
· support from a very small number of academics for Open Access
10 / What are/were the most important inhibitors or bottlenecks for establishing, filling and maintaining IR’s (please explain)
The following is a compilation of responses from institutions, not an agreed national list
· resource implications for tagging [metadata description] content for resource discovery
· identification of criteria for content to be stored
· identification of ownership and control of shared objects
· impact on work practices – both academic and support staff
· overly complex processes
· ill-defined content types
· need – many academics question the validity of eprint archives
· low awareness of the repository projects and their benefits
· lack of time – repository an ‘add-on’ activity not costed as part of budget
· data entry requirements are in addition to other parallel University systems and databases
· over-worked, over-stressed academic staff
· intellectual property owned by third parties
· academic fear that use of repositories may damage their ability to get published
11 / Other(specific) issues related to IR’s in your country which could be of interest to share with others or on which you would like to cooperate internationally: (please explain)
The following is a compilation of responses from institutions, not an agreed national lis
· development of metadata schema for range of object types
· integration with legacy systems
· copyright/IP issues
· formulation of advocacy programmes
· repository governance and management issues
· data preservation and sustainability
· guidelines for the selection of material for inclusion
· guidelines for the exclusion of material from repositories
· use of handles, persistent identifiers
· articulation and sharing of data with other university systems
· extension of the ‘institutional repository’ concept to cover a larger range of IP produced by institutions
Completed by: Name: John Shipp
Institute: University of ydney
Date 20 April 2005
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[1] Netherlands higher education and research partnership for information and communications technology www.surf.nl