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September 22, 2008
Institutional Repositories: Faculty Deposits, Marketing, and Reform of Scholarly communication
Jantz, Ronald C and Wilson, Myoung C. May 2008. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 34, Number 3, pages 186-195.
The abstract is available with the following link:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W50-4SF9C8S-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=8dde194a80432def93d960cb2b1033d5
Full-text can be accessed from UTK e-journal.
Institutional Repositories: Faculty Deposits, Marketing, and Reform of Scholarly communication
"Academic Libraries are today at the intersection of three momentous changes in the world of scholarly communication."
The rise in the number of journals available online which led to the re-evaluation of the scholarly communication process. The article points out the increase in the journal costs and almost monopoly of intellectual rights with some commercial vendors.
"Democratization of knowledge" or open access brought easy and free access not only to the academic community, but anyone who is interested in research. Academic libraries continue to do their traditional role as to collect, organize and preserve, started collecting resources which could be accessed digitally by the academic community. The result is the Institutional repositories!
Institutional repositories, according to the article has contributed to some development on the research front; possible sharing of the faculty research literature. The reference to Antelman's article suggests that there is an increase in citation trend for the online article. ( that the online articles are cited 4.5 times more than the off line articles)
The article further discusses the deposit of the contents and evaluation of the contents in the IR.
The qualitative analysis found out that the institutional repositories are not linked to their library website. They are scattered through out with navigation from digital projects, scholarly communication page, faculty pages and collections and resources pages.
As for the quantitative analysis, the article points out that the libraries "do not see a connection between institutional repositories and scholarly communication or if they do they are not using the library website to explain and market the benefits if IR."
As a conclusion the article discusses, the faculty participation and their lack of interest, lack of communication for the value of institutional repositories. The article ends with a powerful statement, "There is an institutional vacuum here that the libraries should consider filling, namely the articulation and marketing of IR services and how IR can advance scholarship."
It is almost impossible to do a thorough review on the blog, but I think these are some key issues addressed.
~Anu
Posted by colldev at September 22, 2008 10:26 PM