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“I needed a way to preserve the institutional history of our organization and disseminate the research that our scholars produce. Our university’s institutional repository, hosted by the TDL, provided the resource for me to do just that.” |
As the director of the Institute for Molecular Biology at his university, Dr. Smith oversees the research of dozens of scientists working in the fields of genetics, cell biology, and genomics.
His researchers publish in numerous academic journals, but some work goes unpublished and, as a result, it does not become available to others in the field who might benefit from it. Furthermore, some of the institute’s grant funding comes with requirements that results be made available on an Open Access basis. Finally, Dr. Smith needs a place to preserve and disseminate institutional documents of the Institute.
To solve his dilemma, Dr. Smith turned to his university library’s Institutional Repository, which was created and is hosted by the Texas Digital Library. Working with his library’s Repository Coordinator, he set up a Community for the Institute within the repository and assigned one of his staff as the Community’s Administrator. In partnership with the library, the Community Administrator developed policies for submission to the Community and the creation of appropriate metadata for those items.
Within the repository Community for the Institute for Molecular Biology, Dr. Smith and his staff created Collections for pre-prints, unpublished data, conference papers and presentations, and institutional materials such as press releases and interviews. As part of the repository, the items become indexed by search engines like Google, as well as OAI-PMH harvesters such as OAIster, making them easily findable on the Web.
The Community’s contents continue to grow, making the work of the Institute more visible and available to the rest of the research community.
*Dr. Smith is a fictional character.