Online Information Conference

THE INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY IN 2010 AND BEYOND

Repositories emerged in the late ninetines to provide researchers and other creators of digital content with usable and fast platforms to expose their content online. In 2003, it became clear that repositories would play a key role in the theme of Open Access, when the Berlin Declaration on Open Access Knowledge was first announced.   With vast numbers of funding bodies and institutions that signed this declaration, and established Open Access Mandates to support the declaration, repositories matured and  became strategic components in this landscape.  After ambitious projects in institutions, bolstering visions of Digital Preservation and stewardship over produced content, these repositories are online today, offering access to content from the world's leading research organizations and libraries. Trans-national projects, such as the EC's Europeana portal and DRIVER have aggregated content from different sources. These projects were possible through novel standards, such as the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. At the same time, google and other search indexes successfully crawl institutional repositories, resulting in an average of 60% of IR's visitor, originating from search engines.  The current state of the art still faces important challenges. Up until today, it's still easier to find out if you were mentioned in an online blog, than detect whether your research was cited in a published paper or conference proceeding. Repository managers are often faced with difficulties to motivate individual researchers to contribute to the institutional repositories. Unique author identification, copyrights and licenses remain topics to be addressed in current and future research. Furthermore, the question arises if harvesters and search engines are so successful in offering access to the contents of a repository, if there is still a need for repositories, in the form of web-based platforms, to offer this access.  The key argument why repositories are still here to stay, in 2010 and beyond, is the fact that these systems embody the commitment of both an institution's administration, as well as its researchers, to stewardship and long term preservation of the created content. An institutional repository clearly depicts the relation between an individual item, and the institution, which is sometimes less clear or explicit when the content ends up in search indexes or aggregators.  Emerging technologies and standards will enable uses of repositories and novel concepts in authoring of research or learning materials. With individual researchers and institutions guaranteeing the consistency of the individual item data, it will become possible to visualize citation networks as a basis for new notification systems.  Already today, companies such as @mire and Microsoft experiment with direct repository interaction, from within text and presentation editors. Searching for a (scientific) image, definition or publication, to cite in your document or presentation ? This can happen right from within the application. Trends and features from social networks are applied in Repositories under what is called Research 2.0, facilitating more rapid networking and interaction in research communities.

Speaker

• Bram Luyten, Co-Founder, @mire NV, Belgium