Institutional Repositories: Benefits and Challenges for Libraries

Institutional Repositories (IRâ s) offer the opportunity for academic libraries to collect and preserve and disseminate the intuitions scholarly output. Serving an important service to the community, institutional repositories offer many benefits to the academic intuitions community as well as other people and communities around the world. Institutional repositories make it possible to collect content in one location, capture and provide open access to the intellectual output of a university, as well as preserve content that may be otherwise unavailable or out of publication. It is essential to explore the benefits as well as the challenges of institutional repositories to make sure it is worthwhile to the library as well as the institution. It is also important that the benefits outweigh the costs of this ambitious endeavor. This paper will explore issues effecting libraries operating institutional repositories, as well as explore some of the challenges and benefits to libraries operating an IR. Lastly, this paper will examine the future of IRâ s as it relates to issues in sustainability and viability for institutional repositories