Digital Scholarship: Repositories for Scholarly Works

BCIT Institutional Repository

BCIT Institutional Repository supports scholarly, historic, and digitization projects initiated by the Library and Achives at BCIT. 

Institutional repositories have been established in academic and research libraries. University based institutional repositories manage, disseminate and preserve where appropriate, digital materials created by the institution and its community members. They also organize and access these materials. A survey conducted by the Coalition for Networked Information (CN1) and (United States Higher Education Institutions, 2005) found that research libraries have taken on a leadership role in both policy formulation and operational deployment roles for institutional repositories at research universities. In the Latter’s survey, 88% of the respondents indicated that the library had the sole responsibility. The roles of libraries in institutional repositories as follows:

1. Academic libraries retain responsibility for managing and archiving traditionally published print materials.
2. Library programmes and budgets will have to support faculty open access publishing activities in order for libraries to remain relevant in this constituency.
3. For libraries with organizational imperative to invest in the future, institutional repositories offer a compelling response.
4. Libraries are best suited to provide much of the document preparation expertise (document format control, archival standards etc) to help authors contribute their research to institution’s repository.
5. Libraries can most effectively provide much of the expertise in terms of metadata tagging, authority controls and the other content management requirement that increases access to and usability of the data.