What is a repository?
"What goes into a repository is currently less an issue of technological or software ability, and more a policy decision made by each institution or administrator."
A digital repository is a means of managing, storing and providing access to digital content. Repositories can take many forms, and all sorts of websites and databases could be considered to be repositories. For the purposes of this infoKit, we will primarily be looking at institutional repositories.
Putting digital content into an institutional repository enables institutions to manage and preserve it, and therefore derive maximum value from it. A repository can support research, teaching, learning, and administrative processes. Although many institutional repositories are primarily established for the benefit of the organisation and its users, there is an increasing movement towards 'open access' to the wider community, sometimes in a global sense. The JISC/HE Academy UKOER (Open Educational Resources) Pilot Programme included several projects that utilised institutional repositories to make their learning and teaching materials openly available. Issues around this are discussed in the OER infokit which also includes links to the outputs of these projects.
Digital repositories may include a wide range of content for a variety of purposes and users. What goes into a repository is currently less an issue of technological or software ability, and more a policy decision made by each institution or administrator. Institutional repositories are often referred to in strategy and policy documents as they can support key institutional aims and objectives. Typically content can include research outputs such as journal articles or research data, e-theses, learning and teaching materials, and administrative data. Some repositories only store particular items (such as theses or journal papers), whilst others seek to gather any credible scholarly work produced by the institution; limited only by each author's retained rights from publishers. However, some more complex objects such as websites, content-packaged learning objects, 3D topographical representations and other data sets may present technological and management challenges.
One of the advantages of a repository is that each piece of content can be described in some detail via the input of associated 'metadata'. This acts much like a catalogue record in a library management system and allows searching across items within the repository. If the repository has implemented an appropriate metadata exposure method (such as Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and/or RSS) the metadata can then be harvested by external services and exposed to the wider world. Repositories use open standards to ensure that the content they contain can be searched and retrieved for later use. The use of these agreed international standards allows mechanisms to be set up which import, export, identify, store and retrieve the digital content within the repository.
