Institutional Repositories: Preserving and Organizing What You Create Today for Tomorrow’s Researchers

What are you creating, sticking on a shelf, dumping in a storage room, filing in a black hole, and losing? Where are your slides, digital images, poster session products, field notebooks, and data from the last year, the last five years? What about senior theses, student research projects, specimen collection inventories, or finding guides? The DSpace institutional repository system developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries and the Hewlett Packard Corporation is one of several open source software packages being used by research institutions around the world to organize, preserve, and provide access to knowledge created at their institutions in a digital form. While the number of institutional repositories is increasing, content addition is slow, particularly geoscience content. The Ohio State University Libraries, in partnership with the Office of the Chief Information Officer, has developed the OSU Knowledge Bank. The Department of Geological Sciences and the Byrd Polar Research Center are two of approximately 31 communities established so far in the Knowledge Bank. This paper describes the philosophy of institutional repositories and the role of the subject librarian in identifying repository content