inst-repos-lib

Supporting Institutional Repositories at the University of Toronto Libraries

Sara Allain

Candidate presentation — Institutional Repositories Librarian

University of Toronto Libraries

16 December 2014

"Science is not finished until it's communicated."

— Sir Mark Walport, Chief Scientific Advisor, UK Government

Research is not finished until it's communicated.

The institutional repositories are a central component of the suite of holistic scholarly communications services that take research from investigation to publication and beyond.

Institutional repositories are places where the scholarly output of the institution is gathered, preserved, and made available to our communities.

Why support the institutional repository?

• Promotes the distribution of UofT faculty's scholarly output through platforms with strong preservation capabilities
• Empowers faculty to create refereed, highly indexed, open access journals
• Gives faculty an open access option for making their scholarship accessible via self-archiving, where possible

How do we support institutional repositories in order to create sustainable, efficient, and flexible repository services?

Building support within ITS

• Emphasising transparency and inviting many voices from many backgrounds to the table
• Developing a common practice
• Supporting cutting-edge research and professional development for all members of the IR team
• Dedication to regular and informal communications, in-person and in JIRA

Building support within the university

• Ensuring that faculty needs are at the core of new developments via ongoing technical and service-level assessment
• Experiment with bleeding-edge technologies to anticipate faculty needs as well as grant funding requirements
• Proving the added value of the institutional repository through outreach

Building support locally

• Collaborating and participating with peer libraries
• Policy sharing and co-development
• Working interoperably across institutions to share resources and expertise

Building support OCUL-ly

• Learn from a critical mass of insights into a wide variety of services
• Develop interoperably to draw on technical implementations to supplement in-house resources
• Experimenting with the contents of service-level agreements to find the right balance

Support begins with communication

Questions?

This presentation: sallain.github.io/inst-repos-lib

Sources

University of Toronto icon by Natapon Chantabutr | Ontario icon by factor[e] design initiative

CARL/ABRC Institutional Repositories Position Statement

Charting our Future: University of Toronto Libraries’ Strategic Plan 2013–2018

Greater Reach for Your Research: Expanding Readership Through Digital Repositories

Out From Behind the Firewall: Towards Better Library IT Communications

Synergies.org

University of Toronto: Academic Planning in the context of Towards 2030