“A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution. While operational responsibility for these services may reasonably be situated in different organizational units at different universities, an effective institutional repository of necessity represents a collaboration among librarians, information technologists, archives and records mangers, faculty, and university administrators and policymakers. At any given point in time, an institutional repository will be supported by a set of information technologies, but a key part of the services that comprise an institutional repository is the management of technological changes, and the migration of digital content from one set of technologies to the next as part of the organizational commitment to providing repository services. An institutional repository is not simply a fixed set of software and hardware.”

Clifford A. Lynch, "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age", ARL Bimonthly Report, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7.

Overview and Rationale for Institutional Repositories: Selected Resources

Crow, Raym, The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper, Release 1.0 (2002 ) <http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Final_Release_102.pdf>
"Institutional repositories—digital collections that capture and preserve the intellectual output of university communities—respond to two strategic issues facing academic institutions: 1) they provide a central component in reforming scholarly communication by stimulating innovation in a disaggregated publishing structure; and 2) they serve as tangible indicators of an institution’s quality, thus increasing its visibility, prestige, and public value. This paper examines institutional repositories from these complementary perspectives, describing their potential role and exploring their impact on major stakeholders in the scholarly communication process."

Crow, Raym, "The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper." ARL Bimonthly Report, no. 223 (August 2002): 1-4: <http://www.arl.org/newsltr/223/instrepo.html.
A summary of the SPARC white paper.

Crow, Raym. SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide, (2002) <http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html> or <http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide_v1.pdf>
A practical guide that offers an overview of the major issues which institutions and consortia need to address in implementing an institutional repository.

Lynch, Clifford A., "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age", ARL Bimonthly Report, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. <http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html>

Ware, Mark, Pathfinder Research on Web-based Repositories, London: Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions (PALS) (January 2004) <http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/>
"The institutional repository, an open web-based archive of scholarly material produced by the members of a defined institution, has come to the fore following the launch of DSpace at MIT at the end of 2002. This report reviews recent developments and quantifies the growth of institutional repositories, and explores the impact their expansion may have on scholarly publishing."

Repository Models: Sample Platforms and Policies

Open Society Institute, A Guide to Institutional Repository Software, 2nd Ed., January 2004 <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/>

Universities and research centers throughout the world are actively planning the implementation of institutional repositories. Such planning entails policy, legal, educational, cultural, and technical components, most of which are interrelated and each of which must be satisfactorily addressed for the repository to succeed. The Open Society Institute intends this document to help organizations with one facet of their repository planning: selecting a software system that best satisfies an institution's needs.

DSpace (MIT): <https://dspace.mit.edu/index.jsp>
    Policies: <http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/mit/policies/index.html>
    Technology (DSpace): <http://dspace.org/technology/architecture.pdf> and <http://dspace.org/technology/index.html>

DSpace: A software platform developed and used at MIT that enables institutions to capture and describe digital works using a submission workflow module. The system enables these works to be archived and distributed over the web through a search and retrieval system.

EScholarship (California Digital Library) <http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/>
    Policies: <http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/policies.html>
   Technology (BEPress): <http://www.bepress.com/repositories.html>

The Berkeley Electronic Press(BEPress): Works with institutional partners to create digital repositories of scholarly information. The Berkeley Electronic Press provides Internet-based tools for the submission, processing, and posting of materials to digital repositories. In addition to simplifying the depositing of papers, the technology allows readers to discover and view relevant research by topic, author, or sponsoring research department.

Caltech Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA): <http://library.caltech.edu/digital/>
    Technology (EPrints): <http://software.eprints.org/>

GNU EPrints Archive Software: A software platform developed at the University of Southampton which creates online archives that can be "full-text" searched with enhanced searching for names and dates.

Harvard University Digital Repository Service (DRS): <http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/drs/index.html>
    Policies: <http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/drs/policyguide.html>

The Digital Repository Service (DRS): offers Harvard-affiliated owners of digital material with a storage and retrieval system for their collections.

GWLA Member Institutional Repository Programs

Brigham Young University
    DSpace at Brigham Young University <https://dspace.lib.byu.edu:443/>
    About: DSpace at Brigham Young University is a location where BYU faculty members may publish their scholarly work to be preserved in electronic form and distributed over the internet.
    Contact:

Oregon State University:
    DSpace@OSU Institutional Repository <http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/>
     About: Access to digital resources created by OSU faculty members, staff and students as well as resources from selected OSU-affiliated programs such as the Institute for Natural Resources.
    Contact: Michael Boock, Head of Technical Services, michael.boock@oregonstate.edu

University of Arizona:
    DLearn <https://www.dlearn.arizona.edu>
    About: DLearn is a learning object repository of shareable, digital, learning materials developed
at the University of Arizona.
    Contact: Kris Maloney, Associate Librarian / Team Leader, Library Information Systems Team , maloneyk@u.library.arizona.edu

University of Kansas:
    KU ScholarWorks < https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/>
    About: KU ScholarWorks offers faculty a central location for depositing any research or scholarly output considered appropriate by a participating department or center, including working papers, pre-publication scholarship, and published papers for which authors have retained copyright. <http://www.ku.edu/~scholar/>
    Contact: Richard Fyffe, Asst. Dean for Scholarly Communications, Libraries/Information Services, rfyffe@ku.edu
    Other: Fyffe, Richard, Beth Forrest Warner, Scholarly Communication in a Digital World: The Role of
an Institutional Repository, March 2003 <http://hdl.handle.net/1808/126>

University of Oregon:
   Scholars' Bank <http://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu>
    About: Scholars' Bank is an institutional repository for University of Oregon research in digital form, including preprints, technical reports, working papers, student terminal projects, data sets, and more. It's a tool for collecting, disseminating, and preserving the intellectual output of the UO community.
    Contact: Carol Hixson, Head, Metadata and Digital Library Services, chixson@darkwing.uoregon.edu

University of Texas - Austin:
    UTopia <http://utopia.utexas.edu/>
    About:  UTOPIA is a new initiative providing a digital knowledge gateway into the treasures of libraries, museums, galleries, and laboratories of The University of Texas at Austin. It is designed to open to the public the knowledge, research, and information and share these resources—free of charge. UTOPIA will also present the research of key faculty members to general audiences through online articles, presentations, lessons, and discussions. <http://utopia.utexas.edu/about.html>
    Contact: youtanswers@lists.cc.utexas.edu

University of Washington:
    DSpace <https://digital.lib.washington.edu/dspace/>
    About:
    Contact:

Washington University:
   Digital Archive <http://digital.wustl.edu/>
    About: developed to provide access to digital resources created by the Washington University community. It is also designed as an aid to faculty and staff considering embarking on digital projects. <http://digital.wustl.edu/>
    Contact:

Related Information

Open Archives Initiative <http://www.openarchives.org/>

Self-archiving FAQ <http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/>

SPARC: Repository Resources <http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=m0>