portal: Libraries and the Academy

Lynch, Clifford A.
Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age
portal: Libraries and the Academy - Volume 3, Number 2, April 2003, pp. 327-336

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Clifford A. Lynch - Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age - portal: Libraries and the Academy 3:2 portal: Libraries and the Academy 3.2 (2003) 327-336 Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age Clifford A. Lynch In the fall of 2002, something extraordinary occurred in the continuing networked information revolution, shifting the dynamic among individually driven innovation, institutional progress, and the evolution of disciplinary scholarly practices. The development of institutional repositories emerged as a new strategy that allows universities to apply serious, systematic leverage to accelerate changes taking place in scholarship and scholarly communication, both moving beyond their historic relatively passive role of supporting established publishers in modernizing scholarly publishing through the licensing of digital content, and also scaling up beyond ad-hoc alliances, partnerships, and support arrangements with a few select faculty pioneers exploring more transformative new uses of the digital medium. Many technology trends and development efforts came together to make this strategy possible. Online storage costs have dropped significantly; repositories are now affordable. Standards like the open archives metadata harvesting protocol are now in place; some progress has also been made on the standards for the underlying metadata itself. The thinking...