Adapting Kepler Framework for Enriching Institutional Repositories: An Experimental Study

There is growing trend towards academic and research organizations to establish OAI-compliant institutional repositories. ePrints@IISc (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/) is the institutional repository of Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Though the repository is growing steadily, mediated submission by the ePrints@IISc staff is the predominant mode of enriching the repository. We have been exploring viable means of getting our researchers to contribute more actively to the repository. Observations have recently been made as to why researchers might be reluctant to contribute to central repositories [1]. It has been suggested that it might be useful to provide researchers with tools to easily create and share Personal Digital Repositories (PDR) designed to organize and facilitate their research and learning agendas. The collection in the PDR is built and managed by the scholar based on individual needs. A network of such PDRs could form the basis for a bottom up, organic approach to enrich centralized institutional repositories