Institutional Digitial Repository.

Wikipedia describes Institutional Repository as:

An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting and preserving -- in digital form -- the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.

For a university, this would include materials such as research journal articles before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it might also include other digital assets generated by normal academic life, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects.

The two main objectives for having an institutional repository are:

• to provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving it;
• to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost ("grey") literature (e.g., theses or technical reports).

The Notre Dame Libraries' IDR was established to collect and disseminate the scholarly output of the University of Notre Dame's community. The IDR is an online, open access collection of scholarly materials produced by members of an institution.The IDR uses the DSpace open source software created by the collaborative efforts of MIT and Hewlett Packard. For more information about DSpace, please visit: http://www.dspace.org/. Envisioned as a means to preserve scholarly output and provide dissemination for material not supported by traditional print media publication, the IDR has three main goals:

1. to help instructors teach
2. to help students learn
3. to help scholars embelish/supplement the university's scholarly communications processes

When we say that the IDR is an "open access" repository, we mean that the materials included can be viewed by anyone with access to the World Wide Web, without requiring users to pay to view them.

Harvesting content - In an effort to minimize the hassle of customizing applications, we have developed a means to "harvest" content from DigiTool, DSpace, and the ETD Project using a protocol called OAI. We have successfully cached this content in a centralized database and have begun providing services against the cache. The cache uses the same technology as the Database Driven Website (DDW) application -- MyLibrary.

Yes. Many universities have implemented institutional digital repositories using a variety of software systems and organizational schemes. Lists of these universities can be found at: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php, or http://www.inkdroid.org/perl/b/feed/68/25.

Allowing your scholarly materials to be stored and distributed via the IDR will provide greater dissemination of your research than traditional journals or personal websites can. The IDR provides your work with a persistent web link that will remain constant and allow anyone worldwide access over the Internet. The IDR is also ideal for archiving and publishing multimedia formats that aren't suitable for traditional publication methods. Importantly, the IDR, while holding a non-exclusive license to allow your work to be accessed, allows you to retain copyright to your own intellectual property.

Any person or group affiliated with the University of Notre Dame. Materials created cooperatively with co-authors who are not affiliated with the University of Notre Dame are also accepted as long as at least one of the authors is affiliated with the University of Notre Dame and the submitter owns the copyright to the material.

The scholarly content in the IDR, is currently in the initial phase. As such, the IDR team is currently entering all scholarly content and testing the procedure as well.

The IDR can accept a wide variety of formats. To verify that your specific type is supported, please contact the IDR team.

Yes.

No. Only a web browser.

Researchers are allowed access to the scholarly work in the IDR without being required to pay for access. People around the world can access materials deposited in the IDR using a search engine such as Google without worrying about the restraints that proprietary databases often create.

The IDR is an open archive and its contents are therefore accessible free of charge to anyone on the World Wide Web. It is possible to restrict access to parts of the IDR, but we do not encourage that. The goal of the IDR is to allow any person with an Internet connection and web browser to view its contents.

The IDR allows users to search for items or browse through collections of materials. The IDR includes a search feature that allows users to look for items by author, title, or other types of keywords. Items in the IDR are also indexed by Google and other search engines.

Administrative decisions regarding the IDR are made by the IDR team comprised mostly of librarians and information technology staff at the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library. This working group, along with other University Library staff, is responsible for upgrading the IDR and maintaining its hardware, software, and interface.

The IDR and its administrators reserve the right to approve and/or remove material and conversely, the right to refuse to approve and/or remove material. The IDR is responsible for guaranteeing the preservation of materials and guarantees to make every effort to migrate the content if its format becomes obsolete.

As an author, any material you submit to the IDR remains under your copyright, unless you have signed that copyright away to another person or company. However, more and more publishers are recognizing authors' rights to post preprints of their work online; many also allow authors to make post-prints available online. This is true even of some of the largest commercial publishers and many society publishers. If you would like to know where your publisher stands on this issue, visit the Sherpa Web site at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php. You may already have permission to post your work in Scholars' Bank without having to negotiate any special agreement with your publisher.

Open access is used to refer to a group of issues relating to the creation of very open and very low-cost scholarly communication. To quote the Budapest Open Access Initiative, "There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."  For more information on open access a great source is Peter Suber's Open Access Overview.

The Open Archives Inititive is a standards-development effort aimed at facilitating the broad dissemination of information about scholarly content available in digital archives. It does not focus on distributing the content, but rather on sharing descriptive information about works available in archives. By developing information sharing standards, tools can be created that can search across many different electronic archives, even if those archives use very different software for content-management.   For more information on OAI, see The Open Archives Initiative FAQ.   OAIster is a search engine that uses OAI standards to search multiple digital archives. Also, because OAI standards are publicly available even commercial search engines like Google and Yahoo can take advatage of OAI compatible information in running their searches.

Asset Management

Used here to refer to the activities required to build and maintain digital collections to capture and preserve the intellectual output of a single- or multiuniversity community and/or academic discipline. See also Institutional repository.  Source: OCLC

Content Management

The processes and workflows involved in organizing, categorizing, and structuring information resources so that they can be stored, published, and reused in multiple ways. A content management system (CMS) is used to collect, manage, and publish content, storing the content either as components or whole documents, while maintaining the links between components. It may also provides for content revision control. Source: www.xinfomodel.com/glossary.html

Institutional repository

Digital collections that capture and preserve the intellectual output of a single- or multiuniversity community. Source: OCLC

Learning object

A mixture of content, assessment and learning outcomes that are tightly bound for a particular learning topic and can be repurposed Source: OCLC

OAI (Open Archives Initiative)

An organization dedicated to developing interoperability standards to facilitate the dissemination of content. www.openarchives.org Source: OCLC

Open Access

Articles are universally and freely available via the Internet Source: BioMed Central