STATEMENT OF PROBLEM Background

In the last few years there has been a marked increase in the number of educational and cultural institutions worldwide which are in the process of developing institutional repositories. An institutional repository (IR) can be defined as a “digital collection capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community ” (Crow, 2002). The digital collection is housed in a database system to which submitters can add files. Very typically the IR will contain pre- and post-prints of scholarly articles, dissertations, theses, technical reports, and conference proceedings. This movement is motivated by the desire to manage the content of digital curation activities. Content management allows control over the submission, archiving, publishing, access and preservation of scholarly publications and research output. The increased move towards institutional repository development is the result not only of advances in technology and the availability of good open source software but is also motivated by a more recent movement called the “Open Access movement”, which represents a shift away from traditional approaches to scholarly communication. Both the rising costs of serials and the desire and opportunity to provide access to publications and research quickly to a large audience via the Internet have dramatically influenced the development of institutional repositories worldwide. “IRs provide an institution with a mechanism to showcase its scholarly output, centralize and introduce efficiencies to th