Reimagining the institutional repository as an open data archive

Abstract

Institutional repositories (IR) have sprung up in academic institutions over the last decade to provide archival storage and dissemination services for locally-authored digital scholarship, primarily in the form of the traditional peer-reviewed article. However the implementation of IR’s has not rapidly changed the landscape of scholarly communication as expected (1) and, without institutional deposit mandates, many remain underused for their primary purpose. Today, a shift is occurring in academia that has signaled an increased need for the stewardship of digital research data, for example, the expectation by federal funding agencies that researchers share their data and plan for preservation and long-term access. The IR provides academic libraries a ready opportunity to assist researchers with digital data preservation using their established repository services, particularly where national and disciplinary data centers are not available. At the University of Minnesota, our IR is undergoing a replatforming shift from DSpace to Fedora software. This poster will describe the policy decisions, user-needs assessments, and technical infrastructure plans for reimagining the IR to meet data archiving needs across campus.