RepositóriUM : criação e desenvolvimento do Repositório Institucional da Universidade do Minho

Institutional repositories have been the focus of much attention by universities and university libraries these last years. Institutional repositories are inserted in the usually denominated Open Access Initiative movement: This movement aims to promote free and unrestricted access to scientific and scholarly literature, favouring the increase of impact of the work done by researchers and institutions, contributing to reform the system of scientific communication, reassuming academia’s control over publication, increasing competition and reducing the monopoly by the editors of commercial journals. In this context, Universidade do Minho's Documentation Services have set the creation of an institutional repository – RepositóriUM - as a strategic goal for 2003, in order to archive, preserve and disseminate the intellectual production of all of the scientific communities in this University. This paper describes the way in which RepositóriUM was implemented in the Dspace platform, the system’s functionalities, the strategy for dissemination within the Universities’ communities, the process of self-archive or deposit of documents and the application of the Dublin-Core metadata schema to the description of the deposited documents. Finally, results obtained and lessons learned during this first year of the project are presented, as well as the main lines of course to be followed in developing RepositóriUM