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In an educational world with increasing internationalization, digitization, assessment and financial justification, US institutions, especially academic libraries, must justify each new project. Institutional Repositories (IRs) are no exception. The authors attempt to identify factors that might affect the international usage of US IRs as part of assessment efforts to determine an IR's return‐on‐investment.

A survey was disseminated to IR administrators asking for demographic information, international usage counts for website hits and downloads, and any internationalization efforts connected to the IR in order to determine any influencing factors on an IR's international usage.

While many IRs reported various rates of international usage, the largest group of respondents did not report an international usage rate for both page hits and downloads, despite overwhelmingly expressing an importance of international traffic to their IR and parent institution.

It is not clear if this non‐reporting of international usage could be due to ignorance, apathy, or lack of technological support on the part of the IR administrators.

Determining international usage as a part of an IR assessment might be problematic or even impossible for many US IRs.

This study suggests that many IR administrators either do not know, do not care, and/or cannot record international usage data for their respective IRs, which could hinder determining an international return‐on‐investment for the IR.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the initial top-level findings of a year-long comprehensive needs assessment, conducted with the digital library community, to reveal reuse assessment practices and requirements for digital assets held by cultural heritage and research organizations. The type of assessment examined is in contrast to traditional library analytics, and does not focus on access statistics, but rather on how users utilize and transform unique materials from digital collections.

This paper takes a variety of investigative approaches to explore the current landscape, and future needs, of digital library reuse assessment. This includes the development and analysis of pre- and post-study surveys, in-person and virtual focus group sessions, a literature review, and the incorporation of community and advisory board feedback.

The digital library community is searching for ways to better understand how materials are reused and repurposed. This paper shares the initial quantitative and qualitative analysis and results of a community needs assessment conducted in 2017 and 2018 that illuminates the current and hoped for landscape of digital library reuse assessment, its strengths, weaknesses and community applications.

In so far as the authors are aware, this is the first paper to examine with a broad lens the reuse assessment needs of the digital library community. The preliminary analysis and initial findings have not been previously published.

The purpose of this paper is to provide, through a set of indicators, an overview of the way in which Spanish institutional repositories are run and the services they offer their respective institutions and other users. The selected descriptors are based on aspects related to technology, procedures, content, marketing and the personnel responsible for managing repositories.

In order to establish the indicators, a thorough review of the literature was carried out to identify existing indicators that are used to assess repositories. These were divided into five categories (technology, procedures, content, marketing and personnel) with a total of 48 components. An online survey was conducted with the repositories managers of 66 Spanish research institutions in order to verify the degree of fulfilment of the selected indicators.

The survey received forty-six responses, which represented a response rate of 69 per cent. Of these, 44 came from universities and two from research centres. In total, 65 per cent of the repositories have the capacity to import data from and export data to other university systems, mainly Current Research Information System (32 per cent). Most repositories have mechanisms for the large-scale import and export of metadata and digital objects (83 per cent). The use of altmetrics in repositories is widespread (44 per cent). Authors and librarians deposit most frequently (37 and 32 per cent, respectively), in spite of the fact that 44 per cent do not have full-time staff working in the repository. In more than 80 per cent of the repositories, between 90 and 100 per cent of the deposits are full-text documents. With respect to the tools used to promote the repository within the institution, these are primarily face-to-face training sessions (82 per cent), followed by support materials such as manuals and help pages (65 per cent). The academic authorities encourage open access among researchers in 56 per cent of cases, a significant element in repository marketing.

This work proposes a model based on five dimensions and 48 indicators to assess institutional repositories. This approach has been applied to Spanish institutional repositories to provide up-to-date information about their management procedures and promotional methods and the services they offer authors and the university community. This overview of Spanish repositories has provided an insight into the way in which repositories have evolved in recent years and allowed potential improvements to be identified based on the most advanced repositories. This model can also be exported to assess institutional repositories in other countries.

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

Territory-wide system assessment (TSA) was launched and administered by Hong Kong (HK) Education Bureau (EDB) since 2004. Since then, parents and teachers have been questioning its need, value, uselessness, effectiveness, harm for schools, teachers and students. In 2015, the issue blew up with Kau Yan School’s principal boycotting the tests. A series of discussions in the public and media and different surveys were then carried out widely in HK. After review, EDB announced in 2017 that the revised version of TSA be extended to Primary 3 students in HK. The purpose of this paper is to propose that TSAs for Primary 3, Primary 6 and Secondary 3 need a further review to judge their need and uselessness.

This paper reviews the educational policy governing the administration of the TSA. Primary and secondary data from focus group meetings, press interviews (Bogdan and Biklen, 1982; Miles and Huberman, 1994; Ouiment et al., 2001) and public reports would be analyzed. Besides, participant observation (Nosich, 1982; Sou, 2000; Sou and Zhou, 2007) and theoretical reasoning (Nosich, 1982; Sou, 2000; Sou and Zhou, 2007) have been applied for the critical review of this controversial test. The contrast study on the conflicting views of stakeholders in the education industry would bring up some insights of this controversial educational policy in Assessment for Learning.

Conflicting and contrasting perceptions from TSA to basic competency assessment (BCA) among stakeholders of education and government include governmental stakeholder – EDB’s awareness; EDB stressed that TSA is a low-stakes assessment which does not need extra practice for students; non-governmental stakeholders including legislative councilors’ perception, school principals’ perception, teachers’ perception, parents’ perception and students’ perception. Facing the opposition and grievances of different stakeholders, EDB announced in January 2017 that the revised version of TSA: BCA, be extended to HK in May 2017. Parents and legislative councilors were angry and they ask for a review or even cancellation for Primary 3 TSA.

This original study will initiate more thorough revisions and discussions for the TSAs for Primary 3, Primary 6 and Secondary 3 in HK, as a quality educational management step. While TSA for Primary 3 has been reviewed and substantially “revised,” the community at large still asks for further revision for its needs, uselessness and harm for parents, teachers and students. Since the underlying causes of students’ suicides are not fully identified, the problem of over-drilling practices for TSAs for Primary 3, Primary 6 and Secondary 3 needs to be satisfactorily resolved. Thus, TSAs for Primary 6 and Secondary 3, like that for Primary 3, should be reviewed for probable revision.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the institutional repositories (IRs) in South India in terms of policy and procedures, technology, content and contributors, promotion and assessment and personnel.

A voluntary survey was conducted to assess IRs in South India. The questionnaire was designed according to the study framework, which comprises 64 indicators across five areas: policy and procedures, technology, content and contributors, promotion and assessment and personnel. Furthermore, all of the 23 IRs identified were monitored over one year period (from February 2018 to January 2019) to analyse the content growth.

The Research Archive of Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad was found to provide more services to users than other South Indian IRs and it was the sole IR to embed a metadata field for author identification. Almost all the IRs were actively engaged in promotion and assessment activities. IR performance in the technology area was substandard in comparison with performance in the policy and procedures and promotion and assessment areas. For all South Indian IRs, content growth was low.

Very few in-depth studies have evaluated South Indian IRs across all five of the areas listed above and in recent years, no such comprehensive study has been conducted in India at all.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

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 present study aims to investigate various issues concerning the management of institutional repositories (IRs) developed in India.

The survey method was used. The data collection tool was a web questionnaire, which was created with the help of software provided by surveymonkey.com. The questionnaire was e‐mailed to the entire population i.e. all IRs identified in India.

It was observed that 79 per cent of the institutions had used the DSpace IR software package. The respondents considered end‐user interface to be the top‐ranking IR‐system feature. It was found that all IRs supported text (HTML, Postscript, PDF, Spreadsheet etc) file formats. Half of the respondents marked bitstream copying as a long‐term preservation strategy. Almost all institutional repositories were OAI‐PMH compliant.

Only Indian IRs were studied and the findings were compared with other studies.

This is the first detailed study focusing on the management aspects of IRs. The present study has identified the existence of 16 functional IRs, some of which were not registered in any of the directories such as ROAR or Open DOAR.

To provide an overview of how open access (OA) repositories have grown to take a premier place in the e‐research knowledge cycle and offer Southampton's route from project to sustainable institutional repository.

The evolution of institutional repositories and OA is outlined raising questions of multiplicity of repository choice for the researcher. A case study of the University of Southampton research repository (e‐Prints Soton) route to sustainability is explored with a description of a new project that will contribute to e‐research by linking text and data.

A model for IR sustainability.

The TARDis project was one of the first IRs to achieve central university funding in the UK. Combined with increased visibility and citation, the research assessment exercise route has become the “hook” on which a number of IRs are basing their business models.