| Size Isn’t Everything: Sustainable Repositories as Evidenced by Sustainable Deposit Profiles (2008) | |||||||||||||
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| The key to a successful repository is sustained deposits, and the key to sustained deposits is community engagement. This paper looks at deposit profiles automatically generated from OAI harvesting information and argues that repositories characterised by occasional large-volume deposits are a sign of a failure to embed in institutional processes. The ideal profile for a successful repository is discussed, and a new service that ranks repositories based on these criteria is implemented. The definition of an institutional repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members ” (Lynch 2003) has remained an accurate reference point for technical researchers and IT managers alike in the four years since it was coined. Whether the objective is facilitating open access to research publications, building scholarly collections, creating learning objects, scientific data archiving or long-term preservation, the key is to offer these services to the members of the university community. A significant measure of repository success should therefore be the university community’s | |||||||||||||
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