Cornell's DigitalCommons@ILR Nears 2 Million Downloads

Cornell's DigitalCommons@ILR repository, which serves the ILR School (also known as the School of Industrial and Labor Relations), has had nearly two million downloads and contains close to 10,000 documents.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Featuring the scholarship of ILR faculty and researchers, DigitalCommons@ILR also contains workplace-related collections selected by Catherwood staff. Collection items include collective bargaining agreements, records of Congressional commissions and archives of labor and globalization-related web sites. . . .

The most downloaded items in the repository include works by ILR faculty, archived issues of the ILR Review and reports from the Congressional Research Service.

Duke University School of Law Launches Duke Law Scholarship Repository

The Duke University School of Law has launched the Duke Law Scholarship Repository.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Duke Law Scholarship Repository, launching online this week in partnership with BePress' Digital Commons, provides free, full-text access to more than 3,000 scholarly articles written by Duke Law faculty or published in Duke Law journals.

The repository offers a fresh presentation of Duke Law scholarship, but the idea of freely accessible legal scholarship and a commitment to open access to information has deep roots in both practice and theory at Duke Law School.

Under the leadership of Richard Danner, Duke Law's senior associate dean for information services and Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty Research Professor of Law, the Law School became the first in the country to make all the articles published in its law journals — including back issues — freely accessible online in 1998. In addition, unlike most other law reviews, Duke's journals explicitly allow authors to post articles published in the journals without restriction on freely-accessible third party web sites, as well as on Internet sites under their own control.

By making scholarship as easily and widely accessible as possible, Duke does a service to the authors who publish in its journals, says James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law. "Imagine spending a year writing an article and discovering after you finished it that only someone with a sophisticated library or an expensive subscription could read it," he says. Duke's commitment to open access increases readership for authors, which include faculty from other schools as well as student scholars, and can contribute to higher citations for Duke-published work. "It's a huge benefit to both our students and to faculty authors," Boyle says.

In 2005, Duke Law furthered its commitment to open access by establishing an online archive of faculty scholarship, providing free access to the majority of articles published by Duke Law faculty. The contents of that archive are now the foundation of the Duke Law Scholarship Repository, which ultimately will include the text of lectures delivered at Duke Law, webcasts from scholarly presentations and conferences, publications of Duke Law's research centers, Duke Law student works, and more.

University of Western Ontario Launches Scholarship@Western

The Western Libraries at the University of Western Ontario have launched Scholarship@Western.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement by Adrian K. Ho, Scholarly Communications Librarian:

Scholarship@Western showcases publications and presentations from the university community by department. As this is a new initiative, not all academic departments are listed at present. A segment of Scholarship@Western, named Researcher Gallery, offers virtual space for Western's faculty, graduate students, librarians, and archivists to create their homepages and provide access to their publications, presentations, and other academic materials. In addition, Scholarship@Western can function as an online publishing platform for journals, conference proceedings, research reports, and working papers. An online journal, the Western Undergraduate Research Journal: Health and Natural Sciences, will be published to celebrate Western's academic excellence.

Scholarship@Western will feature a niche for the University's master's theses and PhD dissertations. Western Libraries already has some of the past theses and dissertations digitized and will upload them to Scholarship@Western for free public access. Meanwhile, we have been working with the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies to develop a university-wide program that will publish, archive, and preserve future theses and dissertations on Scholarship@Western for widest possible access.

Read more about it at "Online Archive Opens Access to Research."

Related post: "Adrian K. Ho Named Scholarly Communication Librarian at Western Libraries of the University of Western Ontario."

"TCO and ROI: Assessing and Evaluating an Institutional Repository"

Pamela Bluh has self-archived her presentation "TCO and ROI: Assessing and Evaluating an Institutional Repository," which was given at the at the American Association of Law Libraries 2009, in DigitalCommons@UM Law ("TCO" means Total Cost of Ownership and "ROI" means Return on Investment).

Here's an excerpt:

On the surface, a TCO analysis would seem to be a fairly straightforward process. After all, isn't it just a matter of getting prices for hardware and software and determining the cost of staffing? While TCO can be used to determine the financial implications associated with the implementation of an IR and, at a minimum, should examine the direct cost of hardware and software and of personnel it should also take into consideration the indirect or "hidden" costs for ongoing operations such as training, system upgrades, licenses, technical support, and loss of accessibility due to system downtime. While not specifically part of TCO, a thorough analysis should also take into account intangibles such as the complexity of the implementation, the timely delivery of the product, and the availability of an effective exit strategy or a clearly delineated migration path for software and hardware upgrades.

Welsh Repository Network Final Report

JISC has released the Welsh Repository Network Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The aim of the Welsh Repository Network (WRN) was to put in place an essential building block for the development of an integrated network of institutional digital repositories in Wales. The project entailed a centrally managed hardware procurement programme designed to provide every HEI in Wales with dedicated and configured repository hardware. In close collaboration with the technical, organisational and operational support specifically provided for Welsh Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) within the JISC funded Repositories Support Project (RSP), also delivered from Aberystwyth University, this initiative provided a cost-effective, collaborative and decisive boost to the repository agenda in Wales and helped JISC achieve the critical mass of populated repositories and digital content that is a stated objective of the Repositories and Preservation Programme.

The project employed a three-stage approach: requirements gathering, procurement and installation, and monitoring and evaluation. Extensive site visits and regular communication with project partners were a fundamental aspect of project activity and a variety of models were used for procuring hardware including collaborative approaches, outsourcing to commercial software and establishing hosting agreements.

At its most practical level the principal deliverable of the WRN project has been the provision of repository hardware capacity in each and every HEI in Wales which, in combination with the hands-on technical support provided by the RSP, enabled all 12 HEIs to have functional institutional repositories by March 2009. More generally, the project has contributed a series of case studies and test sites that provide the wider JISC community with practical insights into the process of matching alternative organisational models, repository types and hardware configurations to different geographical and institutional settings. The main conclusion to be drawn from the WRN is that while providing funds for procuring hardware helps to push repository development up the institutional agenda, the support that goes with the funding, especially the technical support, is a far more crucial factor in generating a successful and lasting outcome.

Read more about it at the "project Web site."

The University of Tennessee Launches Its Institutional Repository, Trace

The University of Tennessee has launched its institutional repository using Digital Commons.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Trace, the Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange, will promote the visibility and permanence of the UT community's research, scholarship and creative activity," said Barbara Dewey, dean of the UT Libraries.

"Trace will provide global access to UT's scholarly and creative output. The collective excellence of our faculty and students will be highlighted with every click on the website," Dewey said.

Trace content may include technical reports, grant proposals, digital media, campus publications, conference proceedings, extension service publications, and internal archives, as well as scholarly work published in peer-reviewed journals and books when copyright permits. Works deposited receive the same stewardship as other resources in the university's growing digital library. The UT Office of Research, the Science Alliance, and the Office of the Provost are cooperating with UT Libraries to sponsor the repository. The Berkeley Electronic Press Digital Commons platform will host the service for the first three years.

“Repository Software Survey, March 2009”

The Repositories Support Project has released the "Repository Software Survey, March 2009," which analyzes the CONTENTdm, Digital Commons, DigiTool, DSpace, EPrints, EQUELLA, Fedora, intraLibrary, Research-Output Repository Platform, Open Repository, and VITAL digital repository systems.

Two Million Plus Downloads: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Institutional Repository

As of today, the DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln repository contains over 31,000 documents, has had 2,132,581 full-text downloads to date, and 1,307,822 downloads in the past year (see the bottom of the repository's home page). It is also used to publish RURALS: Review of Undergraduate Research in Agricultural and Life Sciences, a gratis open access journal. It uses the Digital Commons software from the Berkeley Electronic Press.

E-Print about Southern Cross University Library's Full Service Repository Model

Kerrie L. Burn and Katie Wilson have made available "Build It and They Will Come?: Assessing the Impact of 'Academic-Friendly' Practices on Institutional Repository Growth at Southern Cross University."

Here's the abstract:

Despite a proliferation of institutional repositories being established in recent years, and the significant financial and staffing resources invested in them, many have not fulfilled their initial promise. While most repository managers have been committed to providing open access to the research output of their institutions, many repositories have limited content and most academics have not yet been persuaded to engage with them in a sustained way. It has been hypothesised that better results might be obtained if population strategies were more aligned with the needs and current work practices of academics rather than the primary focus of the repository being as a showcase for the institution.

In 2008 Southern Cross University Library’s ePublications@SCU project team sought to take a more "academic-friendly" approach to repository development with the view that this would ultimately lead to improved deposit rates. Attempts were made to reduce any perceived complexities of the system that may be barriers to academic participation. Some of the strategies employed by Library staff included: producing promotional material that highlighted the personal and professional benefits for academics of the repository, creating Personal Researcher Pages for each academic in order to showcase their scholarly profiles, and taking responsibility for copyright checking and uploading of all papers into the repository.

Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite

Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give the reader a very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose in accordance with the license.