Clifford A. Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information
The value and purpose of institutional repositories (IRs) has sparked again some controversy in recent months. In 2003, I proposed the following definition of institutional repositories: “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.” I still believe that this definition is fundamentally reasonable, but it is very broad, and many issues have arisen in identifying, prioritizing, and ingesting the classes of digital materials to be managed in the repository framework. In this session, which is part of the Coalition for Networked Information’s (CNI’s) effort to re-examine the roles and strategies for institutional repositories, I want to discuss and test my thinking about content strategies and priorities, and also about the increasingly complex interconnections between IRs and other parts of the campus and national information infrastructures. One objective is to identify an agenda of issues for further inquiry and analysis within the CNI community.
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6639327.html?industryid=47109
