Institutional Repositories

An institutional repository is an online archive of material produced by an institution. For academic institutions, this would include research papers, dissertations and teaching material. Generally, institutional repositories are created for a number of reasons: to increase the visibility of the institution's research output; to store and preserve material that otherwise may be easily lost and to provide open access to the institution's scholarly research. These days, most research institutions have created and populated institutional repositories, but where to find them? The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) has been mentioned here before. This is a directory of academic open access repositories. In addition to the directory OPenDOAR lets you search for specific respositories, and perhaps more usefully, lets you search repository contents. Similar in nature is the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) which like OopenDOAR allows you to browse or search for specific directories and also search the contents of directories. I'd also like to mention Repository66, which is a mashup (a web site or application that combines data or functionality from different sources) derived from Google Maps and OpenDOAR & ROAR, showing the worldwide location of different institutional repositories. Institutional repositories provide a treasure trove of freely available research output that should be considered if you are having no luck with more traditional electronic resources.