4. What is an Institutional Repository?
An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating information
in digital form for the intellectual output of an institution.
“A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members
of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution
and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship
of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization
and access or distribution.” (Source: Clifford A.Lynch, “Institutional Repositories: Essential
Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7.)
An institutional repository may contain work of which the author or institution owns copyright, or for
which permission has been obtained to include a copy of the work in the repository. Thus for
example - a repository might contain the text of a journal article with the agreement of the author or
as a condition of an employment contract. A repository may also contain a copy of the formatted
publication with the agreement of the publisher, and authors may be encouraged by their institutions
to ensure that a publisher‘s copyright agreement allows for this possibility. It follows that an institutional
repository should not contain content for which suitable copyright or licensing arrangements have
not been made.
4.1 Why institutional Repositories?
Repositories provide services to faculty, researchers, and administrators who want to archive research,
historic, and creative materials. The open access and open archives movement, the need for changes
in scholarly communication to remove barriers to access, and the increasing awareness that
universities and research institutions are losing valuable digital and print materials have begun
driving the establishment of institutional repositories. Using open archive models, established metadata
standards, and digital rights management; new and important information sources are seeing the
light of day and becoming more generally available.
While the main purposes of institutional repositories are to bring together and preserve the intellectual
output of a laboratory, department, university, or other entity, the incentives and commitments to
change the process of scholarly communication have also begun serving as strong motivators.
Computers have been ubiquitous on campuses since the late 1980s. Students and faculty are
comfortable with the power of online communication. Faculty teachers and researchers want to
archive their own materials and have them available on personal or institutional Web sites, these
articles, along with the development of the Internet and more powerful search engines, have enabled