Institutional repositories and the humanities: A new collaborative model for scholarly publishing

<p>Slides used for presentation at the Virtual Symposium on Information and Technology in the Arts and Humanities, held April 22 and 23, 2015. The Symposium was co-sponsored by the ASIS&T (Association for Information Science and Technology) Special Interest Group for Arts and Humanities (SIG AH) and the Special Interest Group for Visualization, Images, and Sound (SIG VIS).</p> <p> </p> <p>Traditionally, academic library systems have used institutional repositories to preserve, collect, and provide access to scholarly work produced by those comprising their respective university community. This places libraries near the end of the total information lifecycle, acting in the roles of secondary distributors and collectors. By better utilizing institutional repository software, academic libraries are able to go beyond these roles and instead act as a participant in the creation and distribution of scholarly work. Institutional repositories now have the ability to turn libraries into digital publishers. This is particularly important for humanities scholars, a group that is still largely dependent on the traditional publishing model for sharing scholarly information. By embracing institutional repositories and digital publishing, humanities scholars will be encouraged to reconsider what defines a scholarly work in the 21st century, which may then lead to new methods for creating and sharing scholarly information in a digital environment.