The Current situation of Faculty Participation in Institutional Repositories - A Study of 40 DSpace implementations supporting IRs

摘要

In order to learn the current situation of faculty participation in Institutional Repositories, this paper studied 40 DSpace implementations supporting IRs in America. The study shows the average number of items per archive is about 3222 with the median of 921, and for 38 DSpace cases the average faculty participation rate is about 4.6% per archive with a median of 1.9%. Institutional Repositories (IR) are "digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community" (Crow, 2002). IRs can benefit not only faculty but also other academic members. It can provide open access to digital collections and long-term preservation services. Any user can access the collections by Internet. Self-archiving is the main method of Irs' collection development. According to Coleman and Roback (2005), self-archiving is defined as "practice of depositing digital copies of papers or other scholarly works in an OAI-compliant repository." In an author study about open access self-archiving, Swan and Brown (2005) mentioned 20% of respondent population had self-archiving experiences in IRs. The population of self-depositing in IRs can be faculty, staff, students, and alumnus. In colleges and universities, faculty are the main creators of scholarly documents, so they should be main content providers for IRs.