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This article explores the tension between the concept of a Designated Community (DC) as a foundational element in Trustworthy Digital Repository (TDR) certification and curators' uncertainty about how to interpret and apply this concept in practice.

This research employs a qualitative research design involving in-depth semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in the Trustworthy Digital Repository Audit and Certification (TRAC) process.

The authors' findings indicate that stakeholders in the audit and certification process viewed their uncertainty about how to apply the concept of a DC in the context of an audit as a source of risk for digital repositories and the repositories' collections.

This article brings new insights to digital preservation by applying social theories of risk to trustworthy digital repository audit and certification processes, with an emphasis on the concept of DC.

The purpose of this study was to investigate metadata creation practices in a functional academic institution repository in Malawi, with a specific focus on the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) library.

The study used a qualitative approach with a case study design. The study adopted a case study strategy that focuses on the in-depth, holistic and in-context examination of one or more cases. The researcher used non-probability purposive sampling to include all three LUANAR Digital Repository (LDR) staff at LUANAR library because they were thought to be knowledgeable about the LDR metadata work. The three library staff members directly involved in repository metadata were investigated for the study. Data collection techniques used in a case study approach included semi-structuring face-to-face interviews and documentary analysis. Data from interviews and documentary reviews were manually analyzed and presented in thematic categories based on the study’s objectives.

Qualified Dublin Core (DC) was chosen by all participants as the only metadata structure scheme that they will use to create and implement metadata in the repository. DC application profile was the only scheme used to enforce uniform naming and capitalization conventions in the application of Qualified DC element definitions. The scheme, however, was discovered to be the Qualified DC default format in the DSpace system. All participants indicated that the Agricultural Organization of the United Nations Vocabulary is used. Participants highlighted that institutional repository system compatibility, the subject matter of the resources, resource types and staff expertise influenced the selection criteria for the metadata schemes. The repository policy had been developed but had yet to be adopted by the LUANAR management.

The current study was limited to LUANAR library. A wider study across public and private universities in Malawi is needed to ascertain the role of metadata policy, technical knowledge and metadata specialist institutional repositories.

Metadata policy is to aid in the understanding of the data, ensuring that appropriate security measures are used to protect the data and for metadata harvesting purposes.

Academic libraries should lobby for management support towards metadata policy for institutional repositories.

Very little is known about challenges affecting the growth of institutional repositories and standards adopted, including metadata harvesting. This paper bridges the gap in metadata standards for institutional repositories in developing countries.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the development of institutional repositories (IR) in tertiary institution libraries in Nigeria.

The study adopted a survey research method. Online questionnaire and IR site investigation methods were used to collect data from 25 university libraries in Nigeria.

The study revealed that only 25 (14.7%) universities out of the 170 universities in Nigeria have successfully developed IRs and registered their presence in OpenDOAR. Other tertiary institutions such as Polytechnics and Colleges of Education investigated in Nigeria are yet to develop IRs. Contents such as theses and dissertations, conference proceedings and journal articles ranked highest being the most popular contents in the various IRs. The results showed that the development of IR saves space in the library, increases readership, increases access to local contents, minimizes damage to the original material, facilitates the dissemination of scholarly research and assists in globalization of Nigerian research findings. The IRs site investigation revealed that only few IRs have clearly defined access policy, content policy, submission policy and digital preservation policy. The study identified challenges such as inadequate facilities, unstable internet connectivity, lack of fund, irregular power supply, challenge of collecting materials for the IR, lack of skilled ICT personnel, copyright issues and absence of IR policies.

The results from the study will provide important data and insight into the development of institutional repositories in tertiary institution libraries in Nigeria, and generate suggestions for University Librarians, College Librarians, Polytechnic Librarians, tertiary institutions management and policy makers for developing institutional repositories in Nigeria and other developing countries.

The study investigated IR development in tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The findings will inform other tertiary institutions in developing countries that the development of IR provides an opportunity for the visibility of local contents emanating from institutions and make them see the reason to embrace this laudable development.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a state mandated merger of two institutional repositories from two separate campuses of a university into one new institutional repository. Due to a State Legislature mandate, the University of South Florida was required to merge institutional repositories from two campus into one new institutional repository.

USF Libraries formed a committee, planned for the migration and executed of the migration.

The authors discovered many unforeseen issues during the process of the migration such as difficulties with site redirects and hidden collections.

This project was a large-scale migration of institutional repositories, under a tight deadline due to a legislative mandate, that has not been discussed in detail in the literature.

This study aims to analyze Open Access (OA) publishing trends and policy perspectives in India. Different aspects, such as the growth of OA journals digital repositories, the proportion of OA availability to research literature and the status of OA mandates and policies are studied.

Data for analyzing OA trends were gathered from multiple data sources, including Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OpenDOAR, SCImago and Web of Science (WoS) databases. DOAJ and OpenDOAR were used for extracting OA journals and digital repository data. SCImago Journal and Country ranking portal and WoS database were used to obtain Indian publication data for assessing the proportion of OA to research literature. ROARMAP was used to study OA mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders in India. OA mandates and policies of major regulatory bodies and funding agencies were also reviewed using secondary sources of information and related websites.

India ranks number 15 and 17 globally for OA journals and OA repositories, with 317 journals and 98 repositories. Although India’s proportion to OA publications is 23% (7% below the world average of 30%), the annual growth rate of OA publications is around 18%. Although the governing bodies and institutions have made efforts to mandate researchers to adopt OA publishing and self-archiving, its implementation is quite low among Indian researchers, as only three institutions (out of 18 listed in the ROARMAP) are defined the embargo period. Funding agencies in India do not provide financial assistance to authors for the payment of Article Processing Charges despite mandates that research is deposited in OA repositories. India lacks a national OA policy but plans to implement a “one nation one subscription” formula to provide OA to scientific literature to all its citizens.

The study has certain limitations. Because much of India’s research output is published in local journals that are not indexed in WoS, the study recommends conducting further analyses of publications using Scopus and other databases to understand the country’s OA publishing proportion better. A further study based on feedback from different stakeholders through a survey may be conducted for formulating a national OA policy.

The study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in India, including OA journals, digital repositories, OA research output and OA mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the recommendations on knowledge organisation from guidelines, policies and procedure manuals of a sample of institutional repositories and networks within the Latin American area and observe the level of follow-up of international guidelines.

Presented is an exploratory and descriptive study of repositories’ professional documents. This study comprised four steps: definition of convenience sample; development of data codebook; coding of data; and analysis of data and conclusions drawing. The convenience sample includes representative sources at three levels: local institutional repositories, national aggregators and international network and aggregators. The codebook gathers information from the repositories’ sample, such as institutional rules and procedure manuals openly available, or recommendations on the use of controlled vocabularies.

The results indicate that at the local repository level, the use of controlled vocabularies is not regulated, leaving the choice of terms to the authors’ discretion. It results in a set of unstructured keywords, not standardised terms, mixing subject terms with other authorities on persons, institutions or places. National aggregators do not regulate these issues either and limit to pointing to international guidelines and policies, which simply recommend the use of controlled vocabularies, using URIs to facilitate interoperability.

The originality of this study lies in identifying how the principles of knowledge organisation are effectively applied by institutional repositories, at local, national and international levels.

The study aims to shed light on the current state of “Dataset repositories” indexed in Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).

From each repository/record information, the Open-Access Policies, Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), year of creation and the number of data sets archived in the repositories were manually searched, documented and analyzed.

Developed countries like the United Kingdom and the USA are primarily involved in the development of institutional open-access repositories comprising significant components of OpenDOAR. The most extensively used software is DSpace. Most data set archives are OAI-PMH compliant but do not follow open-access rules. The study also highlights the sites’ embrace of Web 2.0 capabilities and discovers really simple syndication feeds and Atom integration. The use of social media has made its presence known. Furthermore, the study concludes that the number of data sets kept in repositories is insufficient, although the expansion of such repositories has been consistent over the years.

The work has the potential to benefit both researchers in general and policymakers in particular. Scholars interested in research data, data sharing and data reuse can learn about the present state of repositories that preserve data sets in OpenDOAR. At the same time, policymakers can develop recommendations and policies to assist in the construction and maintenance of repositories for data sets.

According to the literature, there have been numerous studies on open-access repositories and OpenDOAR internationally, but no research has focused on repositories preserving content-type data sets. As a result, the study attempts to uncover various characteristics of OpenDOAR Data set repositories.

Open-access repositories (OARs) are essential for openly disseminating intellectual knowledge on the internet and providing free access to it. The current study aims to evaluate the growth and development of OARs in the field of technology by investigating several characteristics such as coverage, OA policies, software type, content type, yearly growth, repository type and geographic contribution.

The directory of OARs acts as the source for data harvesting, which provides a quality-assured list of OARs across the globe.

The study found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was “research articles” and “electronic thesis and dissertations”.

The study is limited to the subject area technology as listed in OpenDOAR; therefore, the results may differ in other subject areas.

The work can benefit researchers across disciplines and, interested researchers can take this study as a base for evaluating online repositories. Moreover, policymakers and repository managers could also get benefitted from this study.

The study is the first of its kind, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the repositories of subject technology in the open-access platform.

Digital innovation requires organizations to reconfigure their information technology infrastructure (ITI) to cultivate creativity and implement fast experimentation. This research inquiries into ITI generativity, an emerging concept demoting a critical ITI capability for organizational digital innovation. More specifically, it conceptualizes ITI generativity across two dimensions—namely, systems and applications infrastructure (SAI) generativity and data analytics infrastructure (DAI) generativity—and examines their respective social and technical antecedents and their impact on digital innovation.

This research formulates a theoretical model to investigate the social and technical antecedents along with innovation outcomes of ITI generativity. To test this model and its associated hypotheses, a survey was administered to IT professionals possessing knowledge of their organization's IT architecture and digital innovation performance. The dataset, comprising responses from 140 organizations, was analyzed using the partial least squares technique.

Results reveal that both dimensions of ITI generativity contribute to digital innovation performance, with the effect of DAI generativity being more pronounced. In addition, SAI and DAI generativities are driven by social and technical factors within an organization. More specifically, SAI generativity is positively associated with the usage of a digital application services platform and IT human resources, whereas DAI generativity is positively linked to the usage of a data analytics services platform, data analytics services usability and data analytics human resources.

This research contributes to the literature on digital innovation by introducing ITI generativity as a crucial ITI capability and deciphering its role in digital innovation. It also offers useful insights and guidance for practitioners on how to build ITIs to achieve better digital innovation performance.

The digital contents (d-contents) are vulnerable to various threats either natural or manmade. Digital preservation is the plethora of a wide array of strategies necessary for the long-term preservation of digital objects. This study was carried out to assess the digital preservation practices for information resources in university libraries of Pakistan.

A quantitative survey based on a structured questionnaire was carried out to conduct the study. The questionnaire containing two sets of strategies (general and technical) was distributed amongst the whole population and received 90% response rate.

Overall, progressive implementation of general digital preservation practices was noted in these libraries like checking the digital collections for viruses, keeping the digital media in fire/water/theft proof locations, restricting unauthorized access, maintaining ideal humidity and temperature, and checking the digital media for functionality. Amongst the technical practices, only replication was in practice at a progressive rate, followed by metadata recording and media refreshing that was sometimes practiced in these libraries. The other technical practices were rarely or never practiced in these libraries. Significant variances in general and technical digital preservation practices were noted based on their physical locations (regional distribution).

The study contributes a comprehensive set of digital preservation practices divided into general and technical types to conduct similar studies in other parts of the world.

The findings stress the need for national and institutional policies, funding streams and skill enhancement of library staff.

The study fills the literature gap and contributes a comprehensive set of digital preservation practices divided into general and technical types to conduct similar studies in other parts of the world.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-02-2023-0074