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Sunday, September 21, 2008

What makes IRs successful?

Carole L. Palmer, Lauren C. Teffeau, and Mark P. Newton, Identifying Factors of Success in Institutional Repository Development - Final Report, Mellon Foundation, August 2008.  (Thanks to Clifford Lynch.) 

Abstract:   With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undertook a one-year pilot study to investigate advances in institutional repository (IR) development. The aim was to learn about successes and challenges experienced by IR initiatives at university libraries that had made a substantial commitment to developing and sustaining an IR. Three sites were studied using the comparative case study method. They were purposefully selected to represent varying approaches to IR development undertaken at research libraries with similar missions and users.

The report doesn't identify the three institutions studied.  However, it does say this (p. 7):  "The three institutions were at different stages of development, but all had made substantive commitments to their IR initiative as evidenced by dedicated IR staff and a relatively high level of ongoing IR-related activities."

From the Executive Summary:

...The normal course of content acquisition was far from routine and unevenly paced. Faculty recruits have been important for sustaining deposit activity. Some faculty have contributed to their IR as open access advocates who believed in the importance of freely accessible scholarship for their research community or their university. Perhaps most important to the viability of IRs, however, were the faculty who found that the IR could solve a particular information problem they faced in the everyday practice of scholarship.

Faculty freely discussed barriers to IR adoption, which included copyright complications and reservations about trends in open access. Some academic units were helping to increase faculty awareness and participation through influential administrators and high-profile scholars who are active advocates. There seemed to be little outright rejection of deposit mandates, with evidence of a patchwork of quasi-mandates emerging among academic units in response to IR initiatives....

Within the cases, there were strong indications that IRs can make important contributions to scholarship, particularly in solving specific information visibility, management, or access problems experienced by faculty. At the same time, some of the assumed benefits of IRs are perceived as redundant by scholars who practice other forms of open access dissemination, or are considered risky by the standards of some disciplinary cultures. In general, the basic aims of universities in investing in IRs —to collect, preserve, and provide access to their research output— seem misleadingly simplistic compared to what IRs are actually attempting to accomplish, and what they will need to do to identify and successfully implement functions that are not redundant or risky and of high value to faculty. While the cases show lower levels of participation by humanities faculty and academic units, the traditional role of the research library as the laboratory for humanities scholarship is recognized, but exploration of the potential for IRs to better support humanities research processes has not yet been prioritized....

The many achievements and ongoing activities documented here can serve as proven approaches for making strong inroads for long-term IR programs....Research questions needing further investigation include:

  • What specific problems can IRs solve for faculty? How do these align or compete with the basic needs of the university to preserve and promote their scholarly assets? In particular, what functions can benefit disciplines that have been traditionally dependent on the library for research materials, or those not well-served by disciplinary repository efforts?
  • Which IR aims should be addressed locally, and which are better organized cooperatively with other university-based IRs? How can these efforts best intersect with and leverage current library operations and consortial efforts? How can established best practices in collection development and liaison-based public services be better exploited?
  • How can IRs interface with disciplinary and cross-disciplinary literature and data repositories and become an integral part of the growing network of digital repositories?

Update (9/22/08).  Also see Dorothea Salo's detailed praise for the report.