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The purpose of this paper is to explore the breadth of the challenges and issues facing institutional repositories in academic libraries, based on a survey of academic librarians. Particularly, this study covers the challenges and barriers related to data management facing institutional repositories.

The study uses a survey method to identify the relative significance of major challenges facing institutional repositories across six dimensions, including: data, metadata, technological requirements, user needs, ethical concerns and administrative challenges.

The results of the survey reveal that academic librarians identify limited resources, including insufficient budget and staff, as the major factor preventing the development and/or deployment of services in institutional repositories. The study also highlights crucial challenges in different dimensions of institutional repositories, including the sheer amount of data, institutional support for metadata creation and the sensitivity of data.

This study is one of a few studies that comprehensively identified the variety of challenges that institutional repositories face in operating academic libraries with a focus on data management in institutional repositories. In this study, 37 types of challenges were identified in six dimensions of institutional repositories. More importantly, the significance of those challenges was assessed from the perspective of academic librarians involved in institutional repository services.

This study aims to identify the readiness of institutional repositories in Indonesia to implement digital humanities (DH) data curation. Data curation is a method of managing research data that maintains the data’s accuracy and makes it available for reuse. It requires controlled data management.

The study uses a qualitative approach. Data collection was carried out through a focus group discussion in September–October 2022, interviews and document analysis. The informants came from four institutions in Indonesia.

The findings reveal that the national research repository has implemented data curation, albeit not optimally. Within the case study, one of the university repositories diligently curates its humanities data and has established networks extending to various ASEAN countries. Both the national archive repository and the other university repository have implemented rudimentary data curation practices but have not prioritized them. In conclusion, the readiness of the national research repository and the university repository stand at the high-capacity stage, while the national archive repository and the other university repository are at the established and early stages of data curation, respectively.

This study examined only four repositories due to time constraints. Nonetheless, the four institutions were able to provide a comprehensive picture of their readiness for DH data curation management.

This study provides insight into strategies for developing DH data curation activities in institutional repositories. It also highlights the need for professional development for curators so they can devise and implement stronger ownership policies and data privacy to support a data-driven research agenda.

This study describes the preparations that must be considered by institutional repositories in the development of DH data curation activities.

In developing and debating digital repositories, the digital library world has devoted more attention to their missions and roles in supporting access to and stewardship of academic research output than to discussing discipline, or domain, specific digital repositories. This is especially interesting, given that in social science these domain‐specific repositories have been in existence for many decades. The goal of this paper is to juxtapose these two kinds of repositories and to suggest ways that they can help build partnerships between themselves and with the research community.

The approach taken in the paper is based on the fundamental idea that all the parties involved share important goals, and that by working together these goals can be advanced successfully.

The key message is that by visualizing the role of repositories explicitly in the life cycle of the social science research enterprise, the ways that the partnerships work will be clear. These workings can be seen as a sequence of reciprocal information flows between parties to the process, triggers that signal that one party or another has a task to perform, and hand‐offs of information from one party to another that take place at crucial moments. This approach envisions both cooperation and specialization.

If followed, the recommendations offered in the paper will allow those implementing various kinds of repositories to work together with others in new ways, thus both enhancing the amount of information preserved and its value for the community.

This is one of the first times that the mutual possibilities of institutional and domain‐specific repositories have been brought together.

The purpose of this study is to explore current practices, challenges and technological needs of different data repositories.

An online survey was designed for data repository managers, and contact information from the re3data, a data repository registry, was collected to disseminate the survey.

In total, 189 responses were received, including 47% discipline specific and 34% institutional data repositories. A total of 71% of the repositories reporting their software used bespoke technical frameworks, with DSpace, EPrint and Dataverse being commonly used by institutional repositories. Of repository managers, 32% reported tracking secondary data reuse while 50% would like to. Among data reuse metrics, citation counts were considered extremely important by the majority, followed by links to the data from other websites and download counts. Despite their perceived usefulness, repository managers struggle to track dataset citations. Most repository managers support dataset and metadata quality checks via librarians, subject specialists or information professionals. A lack of engagement from users and a lack of human resources are the top two challenges, and outreach is the most common motivator mentioned by repositories across all groups. Ensuring findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data (49%), providing user support for research (36%) and developing best practices (29%) are the top three priorities for repository managers. The main recommendations for future repository systems are as follows: integration and interoperability between data and systems (30%), better research data management (RDM) tools (19%), tools that allow computation without downloading datasets (16%) and automated systems (16%).

This study identifies the current challenges and needs for improving data repository functionalities and user experiences.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2021-0204

The aim of this study is to assess the metadata element sets of electronic theses and dissertations that are currently used at Canadian academic institutional repositories, and to discuss issues related to variations and inconsistencies in Dublin Core data used by participating repositories.

The formats and usage patterns of metadata elements at ten participating institutional repositories are identified and analyzed. Additionally, metadata element variations are grouped by different types.

Current metadata elements have a significant level of inconsistency and variation.

The observations drawn from this study are limited to Canadian cases only. However, the results provide insights into developing a metadata framework for institutional repositories in other countries.

This study examines empirical data collected from data providers among Canadian institutional repositories. The result of this study may be beneficial to the achievement of interoperability across institutional repositories and to the development of a standardized application profile for Canadian institutional repositories.

This paper aims to provide a bibliometric study of journal articles related to institutional repositories in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) between January 1993 and August 2017. This study will provide researchers with a foundation for further research.

In this study, articles published were analyzed; titles were searched using the term “institutional repositories.” The data were evaluated in response to four research questions on the following topics: publication trends, prolific authors, core journals and times cited.

The results indicate that 124 articles on institutional repositories were authored by 223 individuals. These articles were cited 722 times in 37 journals, and the h-index provided by the Web of Science was 14.

This study only investigated articles titled with institutional repositories in the SSCI. Other items were not included.

This study shows that the implementation of institutional repositories has been limited to library and information science. If they can be used broadly in different disciplines, a better outcome can be expected.

Based on the findings, the growth of institutional repositories as an academic subject is likely to continue. If such discussions can be conducted in other disciplines, institutional repositories may be able to provide a more promising outcome to academia.

This paper is valuable for researchers who wish to examine the trends of institutional repositories in the SSCI and seek possible areas for further research.

This paper aims to examine the grey literature archiving pattern at open-access repositories with special reference to Indian open-access repositories.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) was used to collect data from different document types archived by open-access repositories across the world. Data were collected by advanced search and browse features available at the BASE on document types, the number of repositories by country wise and Indian academic and research repositories. Data were tabulated using MS Excel for further analysis.

Findings indicated that open-access repositories across the world are primarily archiving reviewed literature. Grey literature is archived more at European and North American repositories compared to rest of the world. Reports, theses, dissertations and data sets are the major grey document types archived. In India, a significant contributor to the BASE index with 146 open-access sources, reviewed literature is the largest archived document types, and grey literature is above world average due to the presence of theses and dissertations at repositories of academic institutions.

Grey literature is considered as valuable sources of information for research and development. The study enables to get insights about the amount of grey content archived at open-access repositories. These findings can further be used to investigate the reasons/technology limitations for the lesser volume of grey content in repositories. Furthermore, this study helps to better understand the grey literature archiving pattern and need for corrective measures based on the success stories of repositories of Europe and North America.

This study demonstrates that aggregated data from the Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal (RAMP) have significant potential to analyze visibility and use of institutional repositories (IR) as well as potential factors affecting their use, including repository size, platform, content, device and global location. The RAMP dataset is unique and public.

The webometrics methodology was followed to aggregate and analyze use and performance data from 35 institutional repositories in seven countries that were registered with the RAMP for a five-month period in 2019. The RAMP aggregates Google Search Console (GSC) data to show IR items that surfaced in search results from all Google properties.

The analyses demonstrate large performance variances across IR as well as low overall use. The findings also show that device use affects search behavior, that different content types such as electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) may affect use and that searches originating in the Global South show much higher use of mobile devices than in the Global North.

The RAMP relies on GSC as its sole data source, resulting in somewhat conservative overall numbers. However, the data are also expected to be as robot free as can be hoped.

This may be the first analysis of aggregate use and performance data derived from a global set of IR, using an openly published dataset. RAMP data offer significant research potential with regard to quantifying and characterizing variances in the discoverability and use of IR content.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0328

The purpose of this paper is to address the practical implications of using an institutional repository to address researchers' needs at a local‐scale.

The paper reports on the process and results of a collaborative research project undertaken by the libraries and an interdisciplinary research center at Purdue University to identify and address the real‐world needs of the center using the libraries' institutional repository.

The paper finds that the local‐scale projects that address the more immediate needs of researchers have the potential to increase the utility of institutional repositories and attract the submission of new content. However, engagement in local‐scale projects requires a significant commitment of time and resources, and should not be undertaken lightly.

A thorough description of how the project was carried out offers a potential model for others to develop similar projects to address local‐scale needs.

Although much has been written about content recruitment for institutional repositories, there are few reports or descriptions of institutional repositories being used to satisfy the local‐scale needs of researchers.

Propelled by fast-evolving computational technology and cloud-based data storage, the increasing ease in research data collection is outstripping the capacity in research data service (RDS) in academic institutions. To illustrate the challenges and opportunities in providing RDS, the author provides a systematic review of the RDS offered in academic institutions and libraries by combining existing literature and survey data collected from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). In addition, the RDS websites of 2013 ARL survey-participating institutions are also examined. The aim of the paper is to provide an environmental scan of the current state of RDS provision in academic institutions, to add to the body of knowledge of RDS development, and to inform and enable academic libraries to make strategic RDS plans.

The paper analyzes the strategies used and levels of RDS provided by reviewing recent literature, exploiting existing survey data from ARL and ACRL, and examining RDS websites of the 2013 ARL survey-participating institutions, in areas that reflect the life cycle of RDS provision including research data management planning, metadata consultation and tool provision, data archiving, institutional repository provision and data sharing and access.

The overall offerings of the library-led research data services in ARL research-intensive institutions have shown signs of increasing. Increased engagement and expanded scope and level of services are two noticeable trends in academic library RDS provision. Academic libraries are taking advantage of open access repositories by advising researchers to use the available resources alongside their local repositories for data safe-keeping and sharing. Discussions on RDS policy and infrastructure development are inadequate or largely non-existent.

Through systematically reviewing current literature, drawing on the results of available surveys on RDS offerings by academic libraries conducted between 2009 and 2014 and examining and further reviewing the websites of these 2013 ARL survey-participating institutions, the author presents the current state of academic library activities in RDS provision, and provides a critical evaluation of the scope and level of services currently being offered in academic libraries, and the opportunities in RDS development, to add to the body of knowledge of RDS provision by academic institutions.