Institutional Repositories : The Experience of Master ’ s and Baccalaureate Institutions

In 2006, MIRACLE Project investigators censused library directors at all U.S. academic institutions about their activities planning, pilot testing, and implementing the institutional repositories on their campuses. Out of 446 respondents, 289 (64.8 percent) were from master’s and baccalaureate institutions (M&BIs) where few operational institutional repositories (IRs) were in place but where interest in learning more about the M&BI experience pertaining to IRs was high. Comments by these library directors in the MIRACLE study demonstrated their desire to learn more about IR planning and implementation at institutions like their own. We address their comments in this paper, which compares IR activities at M&BIs to research universities (RUs). Background and Objectives The proliferation of digital forms of the scholarly record raises serious and pressing issues about how to organize, access, and preserve the record in perpetuity. Furthermore, teaching materials, institutional records, and special collections are increasingly delivered in digital form. The response of academic institutions has been to build and deploy institutional repositories (IRs) to manage the digital scholarship that their learning communities produce and utilize in research and teaching. To discover the experiences that academic institutions have and the challenges they face during IR planning and implementation, researchers have surveyed research universities—the academic institutions most likely to have an operational IR or an IR implementation project underway.1 Expanding their survey to include liberal arts colleges, Clifford Lynch and Joan Lippincott report that only 6 percent of liberal arts colleges Institutional Repositories: The Experience of Master’s and Baccalaureate Institutions 158 have an operational IR. They conclude that "deployment of institutional repositories beyond the doctoral research institutions in the United States is extremely limited."2 In search of IR models, best practices, and success factors, MIRACLE (Making Institutional Repositories A Collaborative Learning Environment) Project investigators enlisted a different strategy. We conducted a census of library directors at all U.S. academic institutions to learn about their involvement with IRs, deliberately casting a wide net, knowing we would recruit institutions that had not yet jumped on the IR bandwagon.3 Academic library directors and senior library administrators at master's and baccalaureate institutions (M&BIs) who participated in the MIRACLE study revealed a strong desire to learn more about the IR planning and implementation experience from institutions like their own. The purpose of this paper is to describe the IR planning, pilot testing, and implementation experience of master's and baccalaureate institutions (M&BIs) and to make comparisons to research institutions (RUs) where most IR efforts have been undertaken to date.4