Utilizing IR Content Discovery Streams

Institutional repositories (IRs) host an abundance of unique and valued digital content. The premise of garnering scholarly and local collection materials is to engage them for visibility and accessibility. As an additional tool to assist in the process of creating an infrastructure for reachable content, the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway tool enables academic libraries to target individual repository collections to minimally harvest the metadata and be visible through WorldCat.org and OAIster. Collection items display their metadata while available full-text deposits from the Gateway create links to expose an IR’s record and the object itself that could include an article or thumbnail image. New items added to an existing IR collection are automatically synchronized and updated. The Gateway provides guidance to get started and maximizes the value-added visibility of library content locally archived in institutional repositories and globally accessible. Currently, OCLC’s WorldCat tools provide discovery to over 25 million digital resources