Repositories

Repositories extend the traditional role of libraries to support research at all stages and preserve, manage, and provide access to many types of digital materials in a variety of formats.

Repositories Benefit Scholars and Researchers

Your research output includes not only published papers, but

• Datasets
• Images
• Conference papers and presentations
• Podcasts
• Spreadsheets, and more.

A research repository allows you to preserve and manage the broad scope of items comprising your intellectual output, and, in doing so, complements your more traditional scholarly communication activities such as publishing in a peer-reviewed journal.

Research repositories also serve the university community by facilitating the collection and management of your department’s work to more clearly demonstrate the full impact of the scholarship and research produced by its faculty, students, and staff.

Preservation

Repositories support scholars and researchers in all disciplines by creating a permanent archive of their digital research output. The contents of digital repositories are backed up regularly and stored on secure servers. Also, repository staff comply with emerging standards for digital formats that support long-term access regardless of changes in popular software.

Access

Materials in online repositories are curated to enable search, discovery, and reuse. Items, or collections of items, have a permanent URI for citations. Also, citations for items that have the proper permissions are available for harvesting by subject-specific or region-based repositories. Repositories can help fulfill funder or journal requirements by providing a publicly accessible location for your research data.

Challenges Facing Repositories

Promoting the continual addition of research materials and the development of innovative services for repositories will require an active and sustained effort by stakeholders, including libraries, IT centers, administrators, and faculty. Some of the challenges facing repositories are:

• Evolving digital formats
  Repositories will have to respond to changes in format standards for digital materials and must plan for data migration in order to maintain accessibility to deposited resources.
• Storage
  As research outputs increasingly include large datasets and video, repositories will require ever-greater storage capacities.
• Interoperability
  Scholars and researchers in diverse disciplines value different kinds of research output, and the variety of file formats that may be placed in a repository will be challenging to manage.
• Cost
  Repositories require staff to curate materials, train faculty, customize software, acquire storage capacity, and migrate data. Because these are recurring costs, repositories cannot function well without sustainable business models and long-term commitments from their parent institutions.
• Digitization
  Some scholars and researchers may have nondigital materials that they want digitized and placed in the repository, but repositories often do not have adequate staff or funding to offer this service.

Notable Examples

At U.S. universities:

• The eScholarship Repository at the University of California
• DSpace at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• eCommons at Cornell University
• Digital Scholarship Archive at Rice University

At UH Manoa:

• ScholarSpace
• eVols

In Australia and Europe:

• ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World), the project of a consortium of Australian universities
• DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research), which has partner institutions from across Europe
• HAL (Hyper Article en Ligne), a multidisciplinary archive run by the Centre pour la communication scientifique directe

Learn More

• The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities defines an online repository in the section "Definition of an Open Access Contribution."
• The Repository Resources page on the website of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has many useful links.