Repositories Recreated – Working Towards Improved Interoperability and Integration by a Co-operative Approach in Sweden

Recently the technological and organizational infrastructures of institutional repositories have been questioned. For example, the British so-called Finch report from last summer argued that further development, as well as higher standards of accessibility of repositories, are needed in order to make them better integrated and interoperable to ultimately bring greater use by both authors and readers. Not only the technical frameworks and presumably low usage levels are criticized but also the lack of “clear policies on such matters as the content they will accept, the uses to which it may be put, and the role that they will play in preservation”. The report concludes that: “In practice patterns of deposit are patchy.” As in the UK, today, all universities and university colleges in Sweden, except a couple of very small and specialized ones, do have an institutional repository. A majority (around 80%) are working together on a co-operative basis within the DiVA Publishing System with the Electronic Publishing Centre at Uppsala University Library acting as the technical and organizational hub. Because the system is jointly funded, and the members contribute according to their size, it has been possible even for smaller institutions with limited resources to run a repository with exactly the same functionalities as the biggest universities. In this presentation we want to demonstrate the ever-increasing importance of institutional repositories in Sweden. Starting more than a decade ago the DiVA Consortium has, for some time, been addressing the problems now raised by the Finch report in a number of areas