Have digital repositories come of age? The views of library directors

1 Webology, Volume 10, Number 2, December, 2013 Home Table of Contents Titles & Subject Index Authors Index Have digital repositories come of age? The views of library directors David Nicholas Professor, Director, CIBER Research Ltd, UK. E-mail: Dave.Nicholas (at) ciber-research.eu Ian Rowlands PhD, is Bibliometrician, David Wilson Library, University of Leicester, UK. E-mail: ir46 (at) le.ac.uk Anthony Watkinson Principal Consultant, CIBER Research Ltd., UK. E-mail: anthony.watkinson (at) btinternet.com David Brown Director, CIBER Research Ltd, UK. E-mail: david (at) scrpublishing.com Bill Russell Practitioner Research Fellow, Exeter Business School, Exeter, UK. E-mail: W.E.Russell (at) exeter.ac.uk Hamid R. Jamali Assistant Professor, PhD., Department of Library and Information Studies, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran. E-mail: h.jamali (at) gmail.com Received August 13, 2013; Accepted October 15, 2013 Abstract This survey of approximately 150 repositories assessed the achievements, impact, and success of digital repositories. Results show that while the size and use of repositories has been relatively modest, almost half of all institutions either have, or are planning, a repository mandate requiring deposit and small gains have been made in raising the profile of the library within the institution. Repositories, then, have made a good deal of progress, but they have not quite come of age. Keywords Institutional repositories; Digital repositories; Open access; Policies; Practices and strategic directions http://www.webology.org/2013/v10n2/a111.pdf 2 Introduction Digital repositories (whether institutional, subject, or format based) have been with us for more than a decade and have become an established component in an increasingly complex scholarly communications landscape. They are commonly used for open access research outputs and regarded as an immediate and valuable complement to the existing scholarly publishing model (Crow, 2002). The digital repository community has big and diverse ambitions and sometimes finds itself in dispute with publishers. The professional and conference grapevine has it that repositories are beginning to bear fruit. So it was thought timely to make them a subject of robust and independent research and establish whether they have come of age and become strategic to scholarly communication, dissemination, and scientific research. This study of digital repositories is the third in a series of research projects conducted by the Charleston Observatory, the research arm of the annual Charleston Library Conference. The Observatory, established in 2009, is a mechanism by which important topics raised at the Charleston Conference can be researched and the results reported back to the conference to provide a feedback loop. It is a virtual research space where evidence can be collected globally in a robust manner and where all the key information stakeholders (librarians, publishers, vendors, and academics) can come together and share data for the benefit of all. The Observatory's first project looked at the impact on libraries of the world-wide recession. In 2010, the Observatory considered social media and its impact on research practice (Nicholas et al., 2011). Both studies received widespread press coverage and generated a series of reports and peer-reviewed publications. The broad aim of this study is to take the pulse of digital repositories and establish how far they have come, what they have achieved, where they are going next, and to what extent they are meeting user needs and expectations. We especially wanted to see how they are dealing with emerging issues, such as datasets and supplementary non-textual information, the extent to which they are facilitating scholarly communication now, and whether, in the future, they would be central to its development. The major part of the survey is an investigation of the views of library directors on digital repositories; directors were targeted because we wanted to learn about the big picture, ambitions, policies, and strategies. A smaller aspect of the study concerned a complementary and comparative investigation of scientific researchers and their use of digital repositories, and while the result of this study has been reported elsewhere, we also allude to some of its main findings here (Nicholas et al., 2012). The principal objectives of the library director study are to:  understand what library directors saw as the goals of their digital repositories;  identify the critical success factors behind effective digital repositories;  assess the wider impact of digital repositories. Digital repositories are defined broadly to include:  institutional repositories that aim to collect widely across a particular university or similar institution, possibly in a wide range of formats;  subject repositories focused on collecting only within a certain discipline, probably across more than one institution; http://www.webology.org/2013/v10n2/a111.pdf 3  format repositories whose scope is limited to collecting in a particular format, perhaps student dissertations and theses, or research data. Literature Review A large body of literature about repositories exists, however, most of it concerns implementation. Few studies have dealt with the evaluation of repositories and we do not know how ‘user-driven’ the development of institutional repositories (IR) has been. Several articles have been published with users/researchers uppermost in mind. Foster and Gibbons (2005), largely focused on the strategic necessity for establishing IRs. Xia (2007) examined cultural differences among researchers in seven repositories. Devakos (2006) described how a number of research methods were employed to solicit adoption of the IR at the University of Toronto. The challenge of getting authors to deposit content, seemingly a perennial problem, have been described in a number of articles, including those by Kim (2007) and by Allen (2005). The disciplinary differences in academics’ attitude toward and use of repositories studied by Allen (2005) and by Xia (2007) were later confirmed by other studies such as that of Creaser et al. (2010) Problems with getting buy-in from users were described in an article by McKay (2007), who said “IRs are less frequently implemented, harder to find, and less visible than their advocates would hope or expect.” The author also pointed out that “little is known about the users of IRs.” A more recent qualitative study of library managers’ views suggested that they are positive about the value of their institutional repository, and the progress made toward recruiting content for it. Yet, this study’s survey also showed that New Zealand academics have been slow to embrace the concept of institutional repositories, and display little interest in using repositories (Cullen & Chawner, 2010). A range of factors seem to influence use of repositories by academics. A survey by Kim (2010) su (...truncated)