Reading Response Five: Institutional Repositories

“Institutional Repositories and the Institutional Repository: College and University Archives and Special Collections in an Era of Change,” by Elizabeth Yakel and others, encompasses the results of a 2006 study of the growing archival involvement in the digital institutional repository, or IR for short.  The authors were desirous to learn the involvement levels of library and archival staff, the types of documents (archival or not) kept in IRs, and the viability of institutional repositories as an archival tool in the expanding digital era.  Through a series of surveys and questionnaires, the authors discovered the number of IRs increasing on college and university campuses as archives play a part in their growth.  Yet archivists often do not serve as the technical experts but instead continue to serve traditional roles as preservation and appraisal experts.

Indiana University has two institutional repositories worth noting for archivists and scholars alike.  IUScholarWorks serves as a repository for academic and scholarly publications.  Faculty and advanced students are encouraged to house their work in this institutional repository.  The other large IR is the Archives of Institutional Memory, or AIM, which serves as an archival tool for a variety of documents from departments across campus.  The AIM is not meant to serve academia but instead the operations of the University, including bulletins, newsletters, and reports.  Each serves an important purpose in maintaining the contributions and history of IU.

The institutional repository is a new tool for archivists in the ever-changing document production environment.  Their existence has the potential for simplifying the preservation of reports born in a digital environment.  I learned during my internship that the Archives of Institutional Memory houses documents in PDF-A format in order to ensure continued accessibility far into the digital age.  Policies such as this allow for electronic work to be processed, preserved, and accessed as easily, if not more easily, than their paper counterparts.  The need for expansive institutional repositories will only increase over time, and one can imagine a 2010 study identical to this 2006 work would produce fascinating results in comparison.  Hopefully archivists will develop more skill in working in digital technologies, increasing their impact on the structure as well as the content of a growing part of their archives.

Yakel, Elizabeth, et al. “Institutional Repositories and the Institutional Repository: College and University Archives and Special Collections in an Era of Change.” American Archivist, Volume 71, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2008, pp. 323-349.