Reading Response Four: Institutional Repositories

“Institutional Repositories and the Institutional Repository: College and University Archives and Special Collections in an Era of Change”

Elizabeth Yakel, Soo Young Rieh, Beth St. Jean, Karen Markey, and Jihyun Kim

The title of this article confused me initially.  My first thought was, isn’t that the same thing.  Luckily the authors explained it quite well!  Basically institutional repositories (IRs) are becoming an extension of the intuitional repository, or archives.  This article served to report on the 2006 Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States. 

The article quoted Clifford Lynch’s definition of institutional repositories as being “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.”  After reading this definition I thought of Ball State’s Cardinal Scholar and IU’s ScholarWorks, which contain materials produced by the those communities to promote open scholarly communication. 

The questions asked were if institutional repositories could be an opportunity to improve the management of digital data and if they are a sign that archivists are losing control of electronic institutional records.  The major issues looked at were the role of archivists in the development of institutional repositories, content recruitment, and preservation of materials. 

The results of the study should that 75% of respondents considered archivists to be engaged in the institutional repository process.  This presence increased as the institutional repository progressed.  When discussing content recruitment, thirty-seven digital documents types were identified, thirty of these could be considered archival.  A majority of the archival materials in IRs are theses and dissertations.  With theses and dissertations included in the equation archival materials make up 70.6% of IRs holdings, seemingly making it necessary for at least some level of input and control from archivists.  There is also the importance of archivists in recruitment of materials because they have had the most experience interacting with faculty and different departments for collection development.

Preservation is seen as somewhat or very important, but according to this study the archives role shows little difference on the importance of preservation.  It seems as though the expertise for this is seen to be elsewhere.  There is also uncertainty regarding digital preservation as it is still an unknown in many ways.  A call for trusted digital repositories is also heard, with the need for bench marking guidelines and certification requirements.  This raises the question of if the role of the archivist will need to evolve so that they can position themselves as digital preservation experts and if that a positive or negative thing.  Are IRs really even the most compatible access tool for archives?  After all, they cannot provide a hierarchical display and they require item-level description.  I believe they can be used as an access tool, but definitely not to replace existing tools.

Yakel, Elizabeth, et al. “Institutional Repositories and the Institutional Repository: College and University Archives and Special Collections in an Era of Change,” The American Archivist , Vol. 71 (Fall/Winter 2008): 323-349.