Institutional Repositories: Faculty Deposits, Marketing and the Reform of Scholarly Communication

Institutional repositories (IR) have captured our attention as having significant potential among the many elements of the digital library genre. Because of the possibility to enhance the current system of scholarly communication and advance open access scholarship, academic libraries have invested resources to build a technical infrastructure that will facilitate access to the intellectual output of their institutions. However, there is little indication that faculty are active partners in building the content of IR. Using the web content analysis method this study explores faculty deposits in IR in selected disciplines and identifies the diverse navigational paths to IR sites from library homepages. The statistical relationship between the development of an IR and the presence of a website dedicated to the reform of traditional scholarly communication is also explored. The implications of these findings for the future development of institutional repositories are highlighted.NOTICE: this is the authors’ version of a work that was accepted for publication in the Journal of Academic Librarianship. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, [Vol. 34, Issue 3, 2008 ], doi: 10.1016/j.acalib.2008.03.014Peer reviewe