Institutional research repositories are based on different models - not only solely a 'digital object' repository

jesshey

Revise

Most early Institutional Repositories were research repositories. Some are purely repositories housing digital objects as in "Repositories are "collections of digital objects"". However, since one of the primary aims is to showcase the intellectual assets of the institutions (as compared to providing Open Access to peer reviewed journal articles) another model was 'hybrid'. The use as a bibliography (suggested both by previous practice and by senior academics) required the metadata to be deposited even if it was not possible to deposit the 'publication'. This is particularly important if you want to showcase well the whole institution, including the Humanities, where outputs are not so easily deposited eg a book or exhibition.
Therefore one model is 'hybrid' including both digital objects and their metadata and sometimes just metadata or metadata plus links to trusted repositories elsewhere. This latter aspect may become more important as the number of these trusted (eg funder) repositories grow. Of course, you can also make a subset of this repository which includes 'full text only' as in the alternative " digital object repository" model but this does not then give a full picture of the institution.

Hey, Jessie M.N., Simpson, Pauline and Carr, Leslie A. (2005) The TARDis Route Map to Open Access: developing an Institutional Repository Model. In, Dobreva, Milena and Engelen, Jan (eds.) ELPUB2005 From Author to Reader: Challenges for the Digital Content Chain: Proceedings of the 9th ICCC International Conference on Electronic Publishing, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven-Heverlee, Belgium, 8-10 June 2005. Leuven, Belgium, Peeters Publishing, 179-182.
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/16262/

Idea # 26Broadening definition, institutional, research, repository, hybrid, model

Comments

o.stephens 1 year ago

I'd argue there is a difference between function and system here. I'm not a fan of the term 'depository' (see posts on definition ideas), but I think that the term 'repository' strongly suggests that it is something you put things into.

My feeling is that although you can use 'repository software' to simply record metadata, this is not using the 'repository functionality'. In the same way some library catalogue systems let you attach digital objects to a record, but I would argue this is adding 'repository functionality' to a library system.

I'm not wedded to the term repository in anyway for 'place to put digital objects', but it seems to me we ought to differentiate between what we are doing, and the systems we use to acheive it. I don't think 'repository' is a useful term to describe what we are doing, but it does (within a certain community) communicate that we are talking about a genre of s/w with specific services attached.

To reverse the example you put forward above, if I were to create a bibliographic database that held citations of all my institutions research output, but contained no digital objects, and did not have the capacity to do so, would it be a repository? I'd argue that it would not be. On this basis I'd argue that the ability to store digital objects is fundamental to a system being termed a 'repository' as we understand the term. Whether you choose to use the repository functionality in your system is a different matter.

c.rusbridge 1 year ago

I'm in two minds here. I do hate the "metadata repository" approach, at least as currently implemented. The deal for me is, I want access to the stuff. If I think I'm on my way to it, then you frustrate me, I get annoyed. I was completely unable to find a single actual paper in So'ton's repository recently!

OTOH, I do agree that the models can differ. For a start, I've always felt there is a difference between the working paper repository and the post-print repository (which we tried to instantiate at Glasgow). We really need to find good ways of making such distinctions, specially if we are to make the repository do more. And data is again probably different, and perhaps best not mixed (at least not mixed as if it were the same).

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