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Academic Works: Your Institutional Repository: Benefits of Digital Repositories

Academic Works is CUNY's central repository to preserve publications and materials that demonstrate scholarship and teaching. The repository is an essential storage unit for scholarly materials which remain searchable by web search engines.

Benefits of Digital Repositories

 

  • Opening up outputs of the institution to a worldwide audience;
  • Maximizing the visibility and impact of these outputs as a result;
  • Showcasing the institution to interested constituencies – prospective staff, prospective students and other stakeholders;
  • Collecting and curating digital output;
  • Managing and measuring research and teaching activities;
  • Providing a workspace for work-in-progress, and for collaborative or large-scale projects;
  • Enabling and encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to research;
  • Facilitating the development and sharing of digital teaching materials and aids, and
  • Supporting student endeavours, providing access to theses and dissertations and a location for the development of e-portfolios.

Institutional Repository - Some reading

Making Institutional Repositories Works - Table of Contents

  1. Choosing a repository platform: open source vs. hosted solutions
  2. Repository options for research data (dspace.mit.edu)
  3. Ensuring discoverability of IR content (http://scholarworks.montana.edu)
  4. Open-access policies: basics and impact on content recruitment
  5. Responsibilities and rights : balancing the institutional imperative for open access with authors' self-determination
  6. Campus open-access policy implementation models and implications for IR services
  7. Electronic theses and dissertations : preparing graduate students for their futures (http://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu)
  8. Systematically populating an IR with ETDS : launching a retrospective digitization project and collecting current ETDS at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (http://scholarworks.umass.edu)
  9. Faculty self-archiving (http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu)
  10. Incentivizing them to come : strategies, tools, and opportunities for marketing an institutional repository (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/)
  11. Repository as publishing platform (http://academiccommons.columbia.edu)
  12. Publishing pedagogy : the institutional repository as training ground for a new breed of academic journal editors (escholarship.org/)
  13. Purposeful Metrics: Matching Institutional Repository Metrics to Purpose and Audience
  14. Social media metrics as indicators of repository impact
  15. Peer review and institutional repositories (College of Charleston’s IR is currently under construction)
  16. Defining success and impact for scholars, department chairs, and administrators : is there a sweet spot? (http://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu)
  17. Creating the IR culture (https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/ or http://dataspace.princeton.edu )
  18. On implementing an open-source institutional repository : a case study
  19. Interlinking institutional repository content and enhancing user experiences : a case study from Purdue University (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/)
  20. Populating your institutional repository and promoting your students: IRs and undergraduate research  (http://digitalcommons.usu.edu)
  21. Next steps for IRs and open access (author is the Executive Director of SPARC)

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