LIS Open Access Institutional Digital Repositories in OpenDOAR: an appraisal

Open access has gained a huge popularity in the forms of open access journals and open access repositories due to the advent of Internet. In the arena of open world open access digital repositories are platforms in which everyone may deposit, search and retrieve digital content from anytime anywhere in the world. The paper tries to evaluate the open access digital repositories in the field of Library and information Science available in OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repository). In this paper the researchers found 126 open access repositories in Library and Information Science available in OpenDOAR. The paper also tries to find out find out the Open Access Repositories in Library and Information Science available in OpenDOAR and evaluate the generic and technical features of them as per items, language, country, repository type, content, software, operational status, etc. For this purpose, 126 websites of open access repositories in Library and Information Science concerned have been taken and after surveying these open access repositories in Library and Information Science, the content analysis has been done in respect of generic and technical features. After analysis it is found that almost all open access digital repositories in the field of Library and Information Science available in OpenDOAR are indexed in English language and some of them are bilingual. It is also observed that open source softwares like Eprints and Dspace have been exploited in a large scale to create open access digital repositories in the field of Library and information Science indexed in OpenDOAR