Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of North Carolina, 2009. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on May 26, 2010). A Master's paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Science, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "April 2009." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of North Carolina, 2009. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on May 26, 2010). A Master's paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Science, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "April 2009." Includes bibliographical references.

This study sought to evaluate the development and use of Institutional Repository by staff and students at the University of Fort Hare (UFH) in Eastern Cape, South Africa. In this study, staff comprised of academic staff (lecturers) and library staff. The aim of this study was to investigate the development and use of Institutional Repository at UFH. To achieve the objectives, both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies were employed. Data was collected through questionnaires and face-to-face interviews. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the participants of the study. Qualitative data was analysed thematically while, quantitative data was analysed statically by help of SPSS software. The results showed that: library staff and management are aware and provide support for the development and use of the Institutional Repository at the UFH; awareness level of IR among lecturers and students is still low; the infrastructure available for the use of IR is not well developed; and lastly, library users which consist of students and academic staff face various barriers in the use and support of IR development. The study recommended for dynamic training, and marketing of IR through seminars and workshops should be started by expert affiliations and universities administration to advance the idea of IR among the University community. Low levels of awareness of the university repository, funding and shortage of library staff remains an issue and could be addressed by further investigating the effectiveness of different communication channels. It is pertinent that the findings of this study would be useful in various tertiary’s institutions of higher learning across the globe in order to embark on IR.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / Institutional Repositories (IRs) and ETD programs conducted in December 2011. The purpose of the survey was two-fold. The first was to show the growth of Institutional Repositories (IRs) across Canada. The second was to illustrate the state of the electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) submission programs at Canadian institutions. The survey was a follow up to a 2009 survey and illustrates there has been steady growth in both the number of IRs and ETD programs in Canada. Results of the survey include statistics on the number of IRs, types of materials in the IRs, the type software platform, the number of ETD programs, whether electronic submission is mandatory, if embargoed or restricted theses and dissertations are allowed, the number of institutions having their ETDs harvested by Library and Archives Canada and the number of institutions sending their theses to ProQuest and retaining a microfiche copy. The survey was sent to Canadian institutions where a thesis or dissertation is required for graduation and to Canadian institutions who are members of the Canadian Association for Research Libraries. Responses were received from 33 institutions. Best practices for ETD programs and workflows will also be discussed. Focus areas include the PDF format for multiple and multi-media files, OAI-PMH harvesting, mandatory submission and embargoes. By analyzing the results of the survey, it is clear that Canada is moving forward quickly in the implementation of ETD submission programs. The fact that over 70% of Canadian institutions have their ETDs harvested by Library and Archives Canada puts Canada, and it’s National Library, in a unique position to share its knowledge and expertise in ETD programs and ETD workflows.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / In 2008 the Peruvian Network for Digital Theses (RPTD) started with 4 universities. According to the National Association of Rectors (ANR, in Spanish), there are 77 universities in Peru, both public and private; 12 of them have an electronic theses portal, and only 9 share their metadata through the OAI-PMH protocol. Relying on strategic alliances, RPTD has rendered more visible scientific information produced in Peru, and has promoted the creation of other portals hosting digital theses and other contents as in the case of AMAUTA, the First Peruvian Digital Repository. It is not a surprise that AMAUTA and RPTD have some common features in design and functioning. Contents collected in RPTD and AMAUTA pose challenges that must be addressed so we can secure a sustainable functioning in time. First, these repositories centralize information so they and make access faster; make possible the re-utilization of data and the generation of other online scientific projects (UNMSM Research Journals); help identify deficiencies in bibliographic description and identifiers, helping us in the elaboration of proposals for the standardization of the bibliographical description and the creation of a authorities data base. These are some of the activities proposed and designed in this article, including challenges faces and possible solutions.

The University of Bradford currently have a number of digital repositories within the University but it does not have an institutional repository. The partly JISC-funded project (Bradford University Repository Project - BURP!) aims to address the lack of a centrally managed repository for the University's research output. This article gives a brief update of the progress in the one-year project commenced in March 2009.

Open access (OA) to scholarly publishing is encouraged and enabled by new technologies such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, their standards and protocols, and search engines. Institutional repositories (IR) as the most recent technological incarnations of OA enable researchers and their institutions to make accessible the outputs of research. While many OA repositories are being implemented, researchers are surprisingly slow in adopting them. While activists promote OA as emanating from the ideals of scholarship, others revile OA as undermining of scholarly publishing's economic base and therefore undermining quality control and peer review. Change is occurring but there are contested views and actions. This research seeks to increase understanding of the issues by addressing the research questions: "How and why is open access reassembling scholarly publishing?" and "What role does introducing an open access institutional repository to researchers play in this reassembly?" This thesis contributes to answering these questions by investigating two IR implementations and the research communities they serve. The research was conducted as an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) field study, where the actors were followed and their relations and controversies explored in action as their landscape was being contested. The research found that central to our understanding of the reassembling of scholarly publishing is the agency emerging from the sociomaterial relations of the OA vision, IR technology and researchers. Being congruent with the aims of scholarship, and also being flexible and mutable, the OA vision enrols researchers to enact it through OA IR, thus transforming scholarly communications. This is counteracted by publishers aligned with the academic reward network within traditional publishing networks. In this delicate choreography the OA IR, its developers, researchers, university administrators and policy makers are merging as critical actors with their more or less congruent vision of OA enacted in their network. The comparative ANT account of the two IR life stories shows how such enactment depends on the degree to which different OA visions could converge, enrol and mobilise other actors, in particular institutional actors, such as a mandate, in transforming researchers' publishing behaviour. This thesis contributes to a novel and in-depth understanding of OA and IR and their roles in reassembling scholarly publishing. It also contributes to the use of ANT in information systems research by advancing a sociomaterial ontology which recognises the intertwining of human and material agency.

Recently the technological and organizational infrastructures of institutional repositories have been questioned. For example the British so-called Finch report  from last summer argued that further development, as well as higher standards of accessibility of repositories, are needed in order to make them better integrated and interoperable to ultimately bring greater use by both authors and readers. Not only the technical frameworks and presumably low usage levels are criticized but also the lack of “clear policies on such matters as the content they will accept, the uses to which it may be put, and the role that they will play in preservation”. The report concludes that: “In practice patterns of deposit are patchy”. As in the UK, today, all universities and university colleges in Sweden, except a couple of very small and specialized ones, do have an institutional repository. A majority (around 80%) are working together on a co-operative basis within the DiVA Publishing System with the Electronic Publishing Centre at Uppsala University Library acting as the technical and organizational hub. Because the system is jointly funded, and the members contribute according to their size, it has been possible even for smaller institutions with limited resources to run a repository with exactly the same functionalities as the biggest universities. In this presentation we want to demonstrate the ever-increasing importance of institutional repositories in Sweden. Starting more than a decade ago the DiVA Consortium has, for some time, been addressing the problems now raised by the Finch report in a number of areas.

Open access (OA) to scholarly publishing is encouraged and enabled by new technologies such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, their standards and protocols, and search engines. Institutional repositories (IR) as the most recent technological incarnations of OA enable researchers and their institutions to make accessible the outputs of research. While many OA repositories are being implemented, researchers are surprisingly slow in adopting them. While activists promote OA as emanating from the ideals of scholarship, others revile OA as undermining of scholarly publishing's economic base and therefore undermining quality control and peer review. Change is occurring but there are contested views and actions. This research seeks to increase understanding of the issues by addressing the research questions: "How and why is open access reassembling scholarly publishing?" and "What role does introducing an open access institutional repository to researchers play in this reassembly?" This thesis contributes to answering these questions by investigating two IR implementations and the research communities they serve. The research was conducted as an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) field study, where the actors were followed and their relations and controversies explored in action as their landscape was being contested. The research found that central to our understanding of the reassembling of scholarly publishing is the agency emerging from the sociomaterial relations of the OA vision, IR technology and researchers. Being congruent with the aims of scholarship, and also being flexible and mutable, the OA vision enrols researchers to enact it through OA IR, thus transforming scholarly communications. This is counteracted by publishers aligned with the academic reward network within traditional publishing networks. In this delicate choreography the OA IR, its developers, researchers, university administrators and policy makers are merging as critical actors with their more or less congruent vision of OA enacted in their network. The comparative ANT account of the two IR life stories shows how such enactment depends on the degree to which different OA visions could converge, enrol and mobilise other actors, in particular institutional actors, such as a mandate, in transforming researchers' publishing behaviour. This thesis contributes to a novel and in-depth understanding of OA and IR and their roles in reassembling scholarly publishing. It also contributes to the use of ANT in information systems research by advancing a sociomaterial ontology which recognises the intertwining of human and material agency.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / One of the reasons that we know so little of ancient life is because much of written history of those times has been lost. We can only speculate what really happened. If only we had not lost all the treasures…If only we had preserved that knowledge somewhere else or in some other medium, then probably mankind need not have to start all over again re-discovering knowledge. The loss of knowledge is due to three reasons - Disasters, Media Deterioration, and Alternative Formats & Obsolete Technology A clear idea about what could be lost will only lead us to take precautionary steps or to lessen the damage. Within a library and information service (LIS), the most likely disasters are fire or flood, but those caused by wind, earthquakes and other natural phenomena can also happen. Acts of sabotage or terrorism may occur which can destroy, or seriously disrupt the LIS. And with more and more information being held in electronic format, computer disasters, whether caused by system failure or unauthorized access and hacking into files, are becoming more common. Information is necessarily recorded on some kind of medium. All media deteriorate over time, at different rates and for different reasons. When information is provided in alternative formats – for example microforms or digitized form - equipment for using them must not only be provided, but also kept maintained in good working condition. Preserving long-term access to digital information resources is one of the key challenges facing libraries and information centers today. The paper iterates what steps have been taken by Physical Research Laboratory, Library to overcome this challenge.