Institutional repositories: proposed indicators of success
| Pages | 211-226 |
| Published date | 01 April 2006 |
| Date | 01 April 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830610669583 |
| Author | Mary Westell |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES IN
CANADA
Institutional repositories:
proposed indicators of success
Mary Westell
Information Resources, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Abstract
Purpose – This paper proposes indicators for measuring the success of institutional repositories
based on their demonstrated integration with other research initiatives and provides a snapshot of the
current state of selected institutional repositories in Canada through a review of their web presence
and their integration with university library and research pages.
Design/methodology/approach – Using the proposed indicators, an examination of the web sites
of selected Canadian universities who are participating in the Canadian Association of Research
Libraries Institutional Repository project was undertaken.
Findings – Institutional repositories are growing in Canada and that the CanadianIR community is
on the way to the proposed model future – integration with existing university research practices.
Originality/value – Indicators such as those proposed in the paper can provide a basic framework for
evaluating IR projects and highlight areas where the library can generate additional support for these
worthwhile projects.
Keywords Digital libraries,Canada, Research libraries, Criticalsuccess factors
Paper type Case study
Introduction
It has been five years since MIT announced its new research project:
... to build a stable and sustainable long-term digital storage repository that provides
an opportunity to explore issues surrounding access control, rights management,
versioning, retrieval, community feedback, and flexible publishing capabilities (DSpace
Project, 2000).
Since, then, institutional repositorieshave sprung up at academic institutions across the
world. Like most ideas whose time has come, a number of technical solutions came to
prominenceat the same time. In addition toDSpace from MIT, eprints at theUniversity of
Southhampton, eScholarship repository from the University of California, other vendor
produced and locally developed solutions, and open source products like Fedora,
addressed the issues of repatriating the university’s scholarly work from commercial
publishersand providing long term, secureaccess. Institutionalrepositories have been the
topic of countless discussion lists, articles, and conference presentations internationally,
nationallyand locally. If the success ofinstitutional repositoriescould be measured by the
volume of the literature produced, the digital tonnage would be impressive indeed!
Prosser (2003) sums up the current thinking:
The benefits of institutional repositories to institutions and individuals are numerous.
Most importantly, they ensure the long-term preservation of an institution’s academic output.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
Institutional
repositories
211
Received October 2005
Revised February 2006
Accepted March 2006
Library Hi Tech
Vol. 24 No. 2, 2006
pp. 211-226
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/07378830610669583
They can also increase its visibility and prestige, and act as an advertisement to attract
funding sources, potential new faculty and students. For the individual, they provide a central
archive of a researcher’s work, they increase its dissemination and so, potentially, its impact
on the research community, and they can act as a full CV as all the researcher’s output is
gathered in one place.
Even after five years, institutional repositories are comparatively new to the academic
world. While the costs of establishing an institutional repository are modest when
compared with other library initiatives (integrated library systems, electronic resource
management systems, acquiring of online resources) the notion of archiving the
scholarly output of the university and making it available in the context of the institution
along with its existing subject context is one that scholars and administrators are still
coming to terms with. One of the best ways of demonstrating the utility of the concept is
to evaluate its success. So far, accepted indicators of success for the institutional
repository have not developed. This paper explores indicators for measuring the success
of institutional repositories and provides a snapshot of the current state of selected IRs in
Canada through an investigation of their web presence and integration with library and
research pages at their universities.
Research questions
Are indicators emerging to measure the success of IRs and how do Canadian IRs rate?
Based on the literature, work with IR colleagues, and personal experience, the author
has developed a framework to evaluate IRs, using eight input indicators: mandate,
integration into institutional planning, funding model, relationship to digitisation
centres, interoperability, measurement, promotion, and preservation strategy. A
further guage of IR success, user acceptance, is outside the scope of this study;
however, further research, particularly usability studies, would do much to complete
the picture of a successful IR.
Methodology
The proposed indicators were testedon Canadian IRs. To this end, an examination of the
web sites of selectedEnglish speaking Canadianuniversities who are participatingin the
Canadian Association of ResearchLibraries (CARL) InstitutionalRepository Project was
undertaken. (Repositories examined included Queen’s University, Simon Fraser
University, University of Calgary, University of Manitoba, University of New
Brunswick, University of Saskatchewan, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo,
Universityof Winnipeg. Additional repositoriesstill in pilot phase were not evaluated.)In
addition to the actualrepository public sites (and theirconnections to various library web
pages), university research services pages were studied to determine the amount and
scope of researchalready available on theweb and how much, if any, was integratedwith
the IR. Where available, policy and planning documents on the web from the university
and the library were examined to see how prominently the IR and general scholarly
communicationsgoals figured.Individual faculty web pageswere also sampled. Using the
observational results, the IRs were compared to the proposed indicators. Additional
information on the Canadian Institutional Repository community was provided in the
results of the annual CARL – IR survey. Thanks to CARL for sharing these data.
It should be noted that there is a strong and rich development of repositories in
Quebec where there has been early adoption of the institutional repository concept and
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