Institutional Repository (IR) is a powerful new service for academic campuses to collect, manage, and provide access to its digitally-produced scholarship in a technologically sustainable system.  ODAI is coordinating the development and implementation of an IR for Yale University with faculty, librarians, and other stakeholders.

The IR at Yale provides a secure, managed environment for its faculty and researchers to deposit digital versions of publications, technical papers, and data, or other digital materials produced for scholarly research and publication.  Theses and dissertations can also be deposited in the IR. Assets within the IR will be assigned a permanent URL, eliminating the current risk of broken links and lost scholarship.  By collocating all of Yale's digital scholarship assets into a single IR, related content – such as a published articles and associated data sets or image files – can be found and used together, and integration with Orbis, Search Yale Digital Content, and other Yale catalogs will enhance accessibility on campus.   Enabling Google and other web search engines to search the data increases visibility of Yale's scholarship, faculty, and the institution itself.

Benefits and Features of the IR:

• Enhanced search and discovery of Yale scholarship through local catalogs and web search engines.
• Unified system aggregates digital scholarship that is currently isolated in individual systems.
• Sophisticated reporting on usage and demographics.
• Supports and enhances teaching and learning, as well as improving search and discovery of faculty scholarship.
• A university digital archive for its scholarly publications and associated data, as well as  a central depository for digital theses and dissertations.
• A centralized platform and process to manage intellectual property rights, access issues and licensing of Yale's digital assets.
• Yale’s commitment to the ongoing curation of digital scholarly output will strengthen grant and funding proposals.
• Integration with a faculty profile management/activity reporting systems will provide comprehensive view of faculty research, writing, and teaching activities.
• Central management ensures continuity and accessibility to the content over time. 
• Central infrastructure will reduce overall management and technical migration costs by reducing isolated information silos across campus and it will eliminate the need for supporting separate school and departmental content management systems.

IR Project History:

Spring 2011:  ODAI worked with selected faculty members to better understand how they will use the IR by adding their content to the IR. This pilot phase was supported by the staff of the University Library (Charles Greenberg, Michelle Hudson, and Lidia Uziel) and resulted in the development of use cases. View the report: Institutional Repository Use Cases.

Fall 2010: ODAI implemented and tested a working IR  using open source software (DSpace) that was developed at MIT and has been implemented by Harvard, Duke, Rochester, and hundreds of other campuses.  Features of the Yale IR  include: the ability to deposit content into ‘communities’ (for example academic departments, research centers, subject groups of content, individual faculty member collections, etc.), searching and displaying content, and reviewing and controlling access to content.  Sample articles, datasets, and working papers copied from openly accessible faculty websites are available in the pilot and can be viewed at http://repository.odai.yale.edu/

Technology:

An IR is a software environment with underlying storage infrastructure. The web interface to the IR has easy tools for faculty or their designates (assistants, librarians, IT support) to deposit content. Content is easily searched and retrieved. Access controls can be set at multiple levels, including open access on the web, open only to Yale, or open to smaller groups designated by the depositor. Embargo periods also can be set to keep content private for a designated length of time. The server and storage environments are 24x7 production services managed centrally in ITS.

Policy - Intellectual Property Rights and Access:

The implementation of an IR requires policy decisions about intellectual property rights and access. These questions are in review by the Provost’s Committee on Access to Scholarly Publications. Although a thorough analysis of practice has not yet been done, it appears that most institutions are retaining a non-exclusive, non-commercial right to store, manage, preserve, and make the IR content openly accessible. The decision to participate is left to the individual faculty member either through an opt-in or opt-out mechanism. Once established, ODAI would work with faculty and staff committees or working groups to review policy and practice issues such as what content is excluded, if any, norms of practice, relationship to disciplinary repositories, and managing publisher expectations.

• Standards - TBD
• Architecture TBD
• Workflow - TBD
• Service Guides - TBD
• A variety of training materials have been developed by the DSpace user community and are available from http://www.dspace.org/new-user-training