Changing nature of academic librarianship: Implementing a distributed institutional repository

Librarians at Purdue University are adapting to the implementation of a distributed institutional repository (DIR). Traditionally, a librarian\u27s role in the cycle of scholarly communication has been focused on the products of research: books, articles, dissertations, etc. The DIR is pushing the librarian\u27s role further back in the cycle by assisting and advising researchers on how their data can best be collected, tagged, and stored. In some cases, librarians are even becoming embedded within research groups. Once in the DIR, these data sets and other non-traditional types of information are just as accessible as books and journal articles. The DIR is opening up new avenues of research for librarians and allowing for renewed interactions with faculty across disciplines. This paper will look at how the role of an academic librarian is changing in regard to the implementation of a DIR on campus, including successes and pitfalls. [ACS Abstract