The Research Information Network has released Data Centres: Their Use, Value and Impact.

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years, the value of data as a primary research output has begun to be increasingly recognised. New technology has made it possible to create, store and reuse datasets, either for new analysis or for combination with other data in order to answer different questions. In the UK, academic researchers, funders and institutions have responded to these possibilities by supporting a number of data centres' organisations with responsibility for supplying research data to the academic community, and in some cases for collecting, storing and curating such data as well. . . .

This study sought to understand usage of UK data centres among researchers, and to examine the impact of such use upon their work. We undertook a series of initial interviews with research funders to understand the role and importance of data and data centres within various academic fields, followed by a survey of the users of five data centres. Finally, through the interviews and surveys, a set of case studies was identified where the data centre had benefited a researcher's work, and in some cases that work had gone on to have an impact in wider society.

| New: Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Digital Scholarship has released the Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011. This 96-page book presents over 600 English-language articles, books, technical reports, and other works that are useful in understanding institutional repositories and ETDs. It covers institutional repository (IR) country and regional surveys, multiple-institution repositories, specific IRs, IR digital preservation issues, IR library issues, IR metadata strategies, institutional open access mandates and policies, IR R&D projects, IR research studies, IR open source software, and electronic theses and dissertations. Most sources have been published from 2000 through June 30, 2011; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included. Many references have links to freely available copies of included works.

The Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 is available as a $9.95 paperback (ISBN: 146377429X) and an open access PDF file. All versions of the bibliography are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

For further information about Digital Scholarship publications, see the "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview" and "Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications."

| Digital Scholarship |

Bhaskar Mukherjee and Mohammad Nazim have published "Open Access Institutional Archives: A Quantitative Study (2006-2010)" in the DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology.

Here's an excerpt:

Open access publishing is growing in importance, and, in parallel, the role of institutional archives has come to the forefront of discussion within the library community. The present study is an attempt to analyse the present trend of institutional archives worldwide. The factual data of each individual repository was collected from various Directories of Institutional Repositories by using survey method. Data was analysed in terms of quantity of institutional archives increased during last six years, countrywise contents of institutional archives, types of materials archived, subject coverage, software used, language of interface of institutional archives, host domains, and policy of institutional archives. The results of the study suggest healthy growth in terms of quantity of institutional archives' increase worldwide, however, the development is more prevalent in developed countries than developing countries. The subject analysis of the institutional archives indicates that the contributors in the field of health and medicine are more interested to submit their materials in repositories. Currently the institutional archives mostly house traditional (print-oriented) scholarly publications and grey literature, using DSpace software and most of these materials were of English language. However, the policy of content inclusion, submission and preservation is yet to be well defined in institutional archives.

| Digital Scholarship |

JISC has released Setting Institutional Repositories on the Path to Digital Preservation: Final Project Report from the JISC KeepIt Project.

Here's an excerpt:

Digital preservation starts with detailed knowledge and awareness of your own content. The scope for content of institutional repositories has grown from research papers to presenting data supporting the research, also covering teaching materials, and artistic creativity. Four repositories representing each content type—the exemplars—joined the KeepIt project to investigate how effectively each could support the goals of a general repository: trustworthy storage, and preservation. This final report from the project reveals the results, outcomes and implications of the work.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Merceur Frederic, Le Gall Morgane, Salaun Annick have self-archived "Bibliometrics: A New Feature for Institutional Repositories" in Archimer.

Here's an excerpt:

In addition to its promotion and conservation objectives, Archimer, Ifremer’s institutional repository, offers a wide range of bibliometric tools described in this document.

As early as the recording stage, numerous automatic operations homogenize the information (author’s name, research body, department…), thus proving the quality of the bibliometric analyses.

Now, Archimer enables, among others, the automatic calculation of several indicators defined by Ifremer and the different ministries in charge in the framework of its four-year contract. It also offers various criteria aimed at analysing its document production (eg. distribution of the value of the journals' impact factors, evolution of the number of quotations in other publications, presentation of international collaborations…).

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Institutional Repository Bibliography |

The Association of American Universities is a highly selective nonprofit organization of "leading public and private research universities in the United States and Canada" whose US members "award more than one-half of all U.S. doctoral degrees and 55 percent of those in the sciences and engineering."

This post examines whether AAU institutions have operational institutional repositories. Over 80% of the 62 AAU members now have such a repository (see the below list).

Institutions that do not have an institutional repository typically have an extensive digital library of curated digital materials (including works digitized by the library), and they may also have specialized digital repositories, such as departmental digital repositories (e.g., eprints and other digital research materials) or an ETD repository. Such digital libraries and repositories are not included here.

Institutional repositories were identified by OpenDOAR, ROAR, and, in some cases, Google and institutional website searches.

1. Brandeis University, Brandeis Institutional Repository
2. Brown University, Brown Digital Repository
3. California Institute of Technology, CaltechAUTHORS
4. Carnegie Mellon University, Research Showcase
5. Case Western Reserve University, Digital Case
6. Columbia University, Academic Commons
7. Cornell University, eCommons@Cornell
8. Duke University, DukeSpace
9. Georgia Institute of Technology, SMARTech Repository
10. Harvard University, DASH
11. Indiana University, IUScholarWorks
12. The Johns Hopkins University, JScholarship
13. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, DSpace@MIT
14. McGill University, eScholarship@McGill
15. New York University, Faculty Digital Archive
16. The Ohio State University, Knowledge Bank
17. Purdue University, ePubs
18. Rice University, Rice University Digital Scholarship Archive
19. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, RUCore
20. Stanford University, Stanford Digital Repository
21. Stony Brook University-State University of New York, State University of New York Digital Repository
22. Syracuse University, SURFACE
23. Texas A&M University, Texas A&M Digital Repository
24. The University of Arizona, UAiR
25. University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, UB Institutional Repository
26. University of California, Berkeley, eScholarship
27. University of California, Davis, eScholarship
28. University of California, Irvine, eScholarship
29. University of California, Los Angeles, eScholarship
30. University of California, San Diego, eScholarship
31. University of California, Santa Barbara, eScholarship
32. University of Colorado at Boulder
33. University of Florida, IR @ UF
34. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IDEALS
35. The University of Iowa, Iowa Research Online
36. The University of Kansas, KU ScholarWorks
37. University of Maryland, College Park, DRUM
38. University of Michigan, Deep Blue
39. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, digitalconservancy
40. University of Missouri-Columbia, MOspace
41. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carolina Digital Repository
42. University of Oregon, Scholars' Bank
43. University of Pennsylvania, ScholarlyCommons Repository
44. University of Pittsburgh, D-Scholarship@Pitt
45. University of Rochester, UR Research
46. The University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas Digital Repository
47. University of Toronto, T-Space
48. University of Virginia, Libra
49. University of Washington, ResearchWorks
50. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, MINDS@UW
51. Vanderbilt University, DiscoverArchive

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Miggie Pickton, Debra Morris, Stephanie Meece, Simon Coles, and Steve Hitchcock have published "Preserving Repository Content: Practical Tools for Repository Managers" in the latest issue of the Journal of Digital Information.

Here's an excerpt:

The stated aim of many repositories is to provide permanent open access to their content. However, relatively few repositories have implemented practical action plans towards permanence. Repository managers often lack time and confidence to tackle the important but scary problem of preservation.

Written by, and aimed at, repository managers, this paper describes how the JISC-funded KeepIt project has been bringing together existing preservation tools and services with appropriate training and advice to enable repository managers to formulate practical and achievable preservation plans.

Three elements of the KeepIt project are described:

1. The initial, exploratory phase in which repository managers and a preservation specialist established the current status of each repository and its preservation objectives;
2. The repository-specific KeepIt preservation training course which covered the organisational and financial framework of repository preservation; metadata; the new preservation tools; and issues of trust between repository, users and services;
3. The application of tools and lessons learned from the training course to four exemplar repositories and the impact that this has made.

The paper concludes by recommending practical steps that all repository managers may take to ensure their repositories are preservation-ready.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Institutional Repository Bibliography |

The Cornell University Library has released "arXiv Business Planning Update."

Here's an excerpt:

It has been 15 months since we announced the collaborative arXiv business model. As we reported in our previous update, for 2010 we were pleased to receive support from 123 institutions, totaling to $360,000 in contributions and representing 11 countries. We are encouraged with the contributions for 2011 as we already have support from 101 institutions, totaling to $275,000 in pledges from 8 countries.

We are grateful for the coordinated international support from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Collections in the UK, SPARC-Japan, German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), Helmholtz-Alliance Physics (Germany), and Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF). We are currently contacting additional international library consortia for their possible leadership in coordinating support within some other countries. . . .

As part of our sustainability planning, we took a critical look at arXiv's technology infrastructure and prepared a high-level plan, which includes a major change to the discovery and access component of the platform. After having the proposal reviewed by four external colleagues with expertise in repository architectures, we decided to implement Invenio as the basis of a new display and access system. The move to Invenio will facilitate improved collaboration with our partners at NASA ADS and INSPIRE, and reduce the maintenance burden of in-house code. We anticipate the transition, which will include a number of user interface enhancements, to be completed by mid-2012. . . .

In collaboration with the NSF Data Conservancy project we have launched a pilot data upload interface for data associated with arXiv articles. Submission is unified through small extensions to arXiv's submission interface. While the article is announced and stored on arXiv, data is automatically deposited in the Data Conservancy repository and linked from the article (see http://arxiv.org/help/data_conservancy for more information). This is a pilot project, which will be re-evaluated in collaboration with the Data Conservancy by the end of this year.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

The University of Virginia Library has launched its Libra institutional repository.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Save your work in perpetuity with a new tool called Libra. A joint project between ITC and the University Library System, and requested by the Faculty Senate, Libra allows any employee of the University who produces scholarly works to store their papers, and in the near future, theses and datasets, in a secure location. Libra was developed specifically as a repository for peer-reviewed, scholarly articles, although other works such as books may also be deposited, as long as sufficient rights have been retained by the authors.

Read more about it at "LIBRA: University of Virginia's Hydra-based Fedora Repository for Open Access Materials."

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

SPARC has launched the SPARC Subject Repositories Forum (SPARC-SR).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has announced it will host a new discussion forum dedicated to the unique needs of the subject-based digital repository community. As repositories continue to grow as an engine for driving Open Access worldwide, new challenges and opportunities emerge and the demand for more focused conversations grows.

The SPARC Subject Repositories Forum ("SPARC-SR") will enable subject repository managers, both inside and outside libraries, to share procedures and best practices, discuss possible joint projects, and support each other in providing access to an important realm of scholarly literature. The email discussion list will aim to build on the momentum of recent meetings – including SPARC’s digital repositories meeting as well as those focused on subject repositories – and will be the first formal electronic platform for subject repository advocates to collaborate. The founders and community managers of the forum include:

• Jessica Adamick, Ethics Clearinghouse Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
• Julie Kelly, librarian at the University of Minnesota and a coordinator of AgEcon Search, a repository for agricultural and applied economics.
• Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, Science Librarian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Project Manager for InterNano, an information portal and subject repository for nanomanufacturing.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |