Sustaining Institutional Repositories: Breaking the Mold to Add Value

Librarians at Kansas State University and Portland State University recognized a need to document and showcase a more complete view of the digital scholarship from their institution’s faculty, staff, and students; giving each library the ability to elevate the academic research and creative output being produced by their community. The proposed expansion of representation would be accomplished through the addition of metadata only (non full text) records in their institutional repositories (IR), the inclusion of which may run counter to the archetype of open access (OA) IR. The need to provide a more comprehensive view of scholarly activity has been recognized, but not yet addressed by many universities. When it has, various solutions have been used which include using an existing IR infrastructure. This presentation details two pilot projects that evaluated how their repositories tracked faculty research output through the inclusion of metadata only records in their IRs and why redefining our IRs’ scope adds value for our institutions while aiding platform, service, and open sustainability. The purpose of each pilot project was to determine the feasibility of inclusion of metadata records and provide an assessment on the long-term impact on the repository’s mission statement, staffing, and collection development policies