Making IRs indispensable to campus users

Tyler O. Walters, Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications, D-Lib Magazine, October 2006. Excerpt:

Institutional repositories (IRs) are proliferating as they become an indispensable component for information and knowledge sharing in the scholarly world. As their numbers increase worldwide, a new phase of IR development is emerging. Moving beyond their initial functions, IRs no longer serve solely as a place to store, organize, and access content. With rapidly changing technologies, users now desire and expect transportable content that can be utilized within various digital environments and reused in multiple formats, and they need forums for the rapid exchange of ideas with both on-campus and external communities. In response, universities and the libraries hosting IRs are looking for ways to weave their repositories into the "information fabric" of their campuses' academic and business processes and catalyze changes in scholarly communications more broadly.

This article will examine emerging IR developments and explore how IRs can help create a new infrastructure to support scholarly communications and digital research. The experiences of the Georgia Institute of Technology (GT) Library and Information Center while building its IR, SMARTech, and designing related services will be reviewed as an exemplar university....

Under this program, the Digital Initiatives Work Group began to provide technical support services to produce traditional scholarly communications in digital form. Initially, the Group worked to:...Provide technology/production support services to create open access e-journals and other e-publications, providing preservation and accessibility via SMARTech....