Building Value-added Services for Institutional Repositories (IRs): Modeling the Rutgers Experience

Abstract

Institutional repositories (IR) are largely unpopulated due to insufficient faculty experience in self-archiving (Kim, 2010), to inadequate marketing efforts to popularize the advantages of IRs (Jantz & Wilson, 2008), and to lack of faculty awareness regarding the unsustainable costs of traditional means of scholarly communication (Darnton, 2010). This paper explores a number of IR services at Rutgers that, collectively, add significant value to the university’s IR by facilitating scholarly communication and by preserving digital content.... Harnessing faculty self interest to these technological innovations is the surest mechanism for creating a bridge to the sustainable development of high quality research and a major factor in the success of institutional repositories.