Everyone,

This is the basic text that was pasted into the form at http://www.wcsu.edu/president/initiatives/

It doesn't have all the fields in the form but aligns with the major text input areas. It was written in a kind of last minute fashion so you might have to look at in the "something is better than nothing" mode. Don't expect too much.

Use the box at the bottom of the page to leave any questions or comments.

--BK

Proposal For the Creation of an Institutional Repository at WCSU

Overview

Institutional repositories (IR) are an emerging trend in higher education. As a concept, IRs exist to connect author to reader, resource to teacher, and learner to activity in a networked, distributed, and interoperable environment. Because it is institutionally based and connected to the world through the web, the IR has the potential to serve as a tangible indicator of the University's quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research, and its teaching and learning activities increasing the university's visibility, status, and public value.

For a more extensive overview of why an IR might be considered a strategic asset, please see [1].

Implementation

This repository would be developed and hosted by the library. The library currently maintains a server and software capable of creating a base level IR and it is hoped that a more capable repository will be built upon this base. It is expected that a functioning IR would be operational no later than 6/1/2006, but the functions and capabilities of this repository will be mostly determined by how effective we are in bringing possible stakeholders into the project. Please see stakeholder section for more details.

[1] Lynch, Clifford "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age". Available at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml

Sharing WCSU's Intellectual Assets with the World

Purpose of a Repository

One of the main objectives of an institutional repository is to bring together, and provide uniform access to, objects that have been created by the various members of the University community. Currently many of these assets are scattered throughout the community -- some are on paper, some are on people's hard drives, some in the library archives, some possibly on a web server somewhere in the university. Many assets, whether research data sets, student thesis and dissertations, lesson plans or teaching aids, have simply been lost. Unfortunately, this is more so the case with digital objects -- digital objects disappear or get misplaced more rapidly than physical objects.

What is an Instituitonal Repository?

An institutional repository is a set of centralized, web-based services for organizing, managing, preserving, and providing open access to digital scholarship and other intellectual assets created by members of the institution. Examples of these assets might include technical reports, working papers, conference papers, preprints, post prints, books, thesis, datasets, course materials, and digitalized library collections in a variety of formats such as text, images, audio and video.

One of the key concepts behind an IR is that the University itself is the best steward for the intellectual property that is produced by the University community. Often the individual faculty member relies on the journal or textbook publisher to assure that his work is made available. An IR is institutionally defined and is focused on presenting and preserving the work of faculty, staff, and students. At the same time, because of its web-based nature, an IR allows for the widest possible exposure to those assets.

When a digital asset is deposited in the repository an accompanying meta-data record is created for the asset. This record is used for searching locally but can also be harvested by web search engine crawlers like Google. This meta-data record facilitates the discovery of assets in the repository by users throughout the world, thereby extending the University's visibility. This meta-data record can also be harvested by other Open Archive Initiative compatible repositories allowing other institutions or businesses to selectively aggregate records from multiple repositories. These aggregated databases may be discipline-based or research area-based.

Stakeholders

Potentially each and every member of the University community is a stakeholder.

Focus on Research

The concept of a digital repository started in 1992 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and was focused on efficiently sharing research. [1] The archive at http://arxiv.org is well documented and has changed the course of scholarly publishing.

The WCSU Library, as the University's central repository of information and research, is positioned to lead the University in navigating this new scholarly model. It is also likely that as research and other scholarly content becomes barrier-free (no cost), library material budgets can be redeployed.

Beyond Research

We see the potential for WCSU's repository to provide access to not only research papers, but any object that has educational value. Given this perspective, the entire University community can be considered stakeholders.

The diversity of objects creates demands on the functionality and capabilities of the repository. It's our plan to start with the simplest thing that will work that provides what users want. We also imagine that there will possibilities to partner with University Computing and Media Services in developing a rich and diverse set of capabilities.

[1] Public Library of Science
[2] Suber, Peter Open Access Overview

Impact of a Repository

Measuring the success of an IR will be based on three indicators: filling the repository, monitoring its use, and citation impact.

Filling the repository will measure how successful we are at explaining the concept and achieving buy-in from possible contributors and users. Factors that feed into this may include how easy and seamless we can make the submission process and if we can get creators of digital content to see the added value of submitting their work to the repository.

The second indicator will be the amount of traffic that the repository receives. Access logs provide reliable accounting of both local and remote traffic. If the repository can bring a wider exposure to the work be done at Western then we think we can say that the IR is successful.

The third indicator would be the increase of cites and attributions of use of research and learning objects created at WCSU.

WestConn's Four Pillars

The successful implementation of an institutional repository will clearly demonstrate the four pillars of support upon which the University rest.

Mastery

The contents of a successful IR will provide a window into the breadth and depth of the research and teaching and learning taking place at Western. While a successful implementation of an IR will demonstrate the level of mastery contained in the objects that compose the repository it will also show mastery in employing information technology to make available the work of our faculty, staff and students to the widest possible audience.

Creativity

To be successful, the IR will have to be creative in finding, creating, and developing the functions and features that will make willing contributors to the repository out of all members of the WCSU community.

Diversity

The repository will be a direct reflection of the diverse talents, skills and interests of WCSU's community, and therefore will demonstrate the rich and varied texture of the intellectual and educational fabric of the university.

Opportunity

A successful IR would demonstrate that we are able to take advantage of opportunity. The President's initiative challenges us to look at our environment and bring the potential of that environment into being.

Sustainable Operation

Continued funding of an IR is largely a matter of success. The Library is able to devote resources to initiate the project and can likely maintain the project for its first year with current hardware and personnel. If the project were to become truly successful, every facet of the project would have to be evaluated.

Cost Determinants

The two main determinants of cost are technical execution and scope. Predicting project costs reminds one of the old saw "Fast, Cheap, Good; pick two".

Technical Challenges

The technical requirements of the IR are continuing to change but most of those changes are leveraged by the use of open source software.

In many situations, complexity cannot be reduced but it can be distributed. If the user takes on more of the burden of using the system, then the system can be simpler. Unfortunately, most online systems have to be very user friendly or users simply won't use the system. Hopefully, we will be able to find some balance on this matter.

Scope

Operational costs are often a function of use; the more users, the more support staff necessary. If we're fortunate enough to create a usable interface and can automate much of the submission process, operating costs should scale.

Where we see a more linear growth is in supporting faculty, staff, and students in creating and formating the objects they wish to submit to the repository. As the scope of the repository increases these costs will definitely be beyond the ability of the library to support.