repository

Institutional repositories (IRs) are a development in managing digital objects for effective utilization. IR establishment is a challenge as well as an opportunity for information professionals. It may include a variety of research output of any organization. An IR is a means to ensure that the published work of scholars is available to the academic community even after increases in subscription fees or budget cuts within libraries (Bhardwaj, 2014& Boufarss 2011). The majority of research scholars do not provide free access to their research output to their colleagues in an organization (Ahmed and Al-Baridi 2012). IRs provide scholars with a common platform so that everyone in the institution can contribute scholarly material to promote cross-campus interdisciplinary research.An institutional repository (IR) is an online archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. An institutional repository can be viewed as a “…a set of services that a university offers to members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.” For a university, this includes materials such as monographs, eprints of academic journal articles’both before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review’as well as electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). An institutional repository might also include other digital assets generated by academics, such as administrative documents, course notes, learning objects, or conference proceedings. Deposit of material in an institutional repository is sometimes mandated by that institution. Some of the main objectives for having an institutional repository are to provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving it, to create global visibility for an institution’s scholarly research, and to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost (“grey”) literature such as theses or technical reports.