Institutional repositories

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Contents

Introduction

See also Open access in Canada, PubMedCentral Canada and Research for librarians - portal

An institutional repository (IR) is a digital space or depository where research output and digital assets of knowledge-based institutions are uploaded and archived. As more research is born digital, institutions must identify and collect this information for archival purposes and to support further research. Health librarians assume key roles in managing IRs and in using open source software. In the early 1990s, the need to share preprints of journal articles arose in the physics community. Astrophysics and computer science were among the first fields to use repositories, and grew out of an e-print movement started by Paul Ginsparg and the ArXiv respository in 1991. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was among the first to launch an IR with Hewlett-Packard. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) issued a paper entitled "The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper" and put IRs in the spotlight. In a state of evolution, IRs require considerable support and service models to collect, organize and preserve content. Librarians are taking responsibility for developing IRs as the mission of libraries for both the infrastructure and types of materials collected are part of our mission. There are challenges posed by extending our responsibilities beyond traditional library work but this will continue to be our focus in the years ahead.

IRs to support medical science

Many medical journals have online publishing operations in place and contribute to a growing corpus of published material on the web. This literature must be preserved to ensure its stable access in the long term. This is what many universities are now planning and what health libraries have begun to do. The U.S. National Library of Medicine's (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) is a digital repository of full-text, peer-reviewed biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research journals. It is a publicly-accessible, stable, permanent, and searchable archive. Publishers may provide PMC with a final version of a document, and public access to the final version can be arranged. Through the well-funded Wellcome Trust, the UK commenced its own PubMedCentral archive in 2007; Canada followed in 2009 with PubMedCentral Canada.

Canadian context

IRs in the sciences have generally been housed at research universities in the US (e.g., California, Harvard, Cornell, MIT, Stanford) where there are endowments. Some of these IRs have received funding from the National Science Foundation under the Digital Libraries Initiative or the National Science Library program. Development of IRs in Canada has been slower. While IRs are considered useful for institutional data and publications, they are not always appropriate for all institutions. That said, several Canadian universities have successfully established IRs to store faculty publications and to deposit self-archived copies of lectures, papers and digital learning objects. In health and hospital knowledge management, IRs have the potential to open up the research activities for all to see.

Search engines

  • OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service whose goal is to create a collection of previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources, easily searchable by anyone.
  • Google scholar is a specific academic, peer-reviewed channel for researchers familiar and fond of the Google search interface and functionality. GS crawls many of the repositories mentioned above for easy, one-stop searching.

References

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