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What is a repository?What is a Repository?A digital repository is a mechanism for managing and storing digital content. Repositories can be subject or institutional in their focus. Putting content into an institutional repository enables staff and institutions to manage and preserve it, and therefore derive maximum value from it. A repository can support research, learning, and administrative processes. Repositories use open standards to ensure that the content they contain is accessible in that it can be searched and retrieved for later use. The use of these agreed international standards allows mechanisms to be set up which import, export, identify, store and retrieve the digital content within the repository. Digital repositories may include a wide range of content for a variety of purposes and users. What goes into a repository is currently less an issue of technological or software ability, and more a policy decision made by each institution or administrator. Typically content can include research outputs such as journal articles or research data, e-theses, e-learning objects and teaching materials, and administrative data. Some repositories only take in particular items (such as theses or journal papers), whilst others seek to gather any credible scholarly work produced by the institution; limited only by each author's retained rights from publishers. However, some more complex objects (websites, advanced learning objects, 3D topographical representations and other data sets) do present a technological challenge. Special CharacteristicsWhat makes digital repositories special from other digital collections? Heery and Anderson in their 'Repositories Review' for JISC propose that a repository differs from other digital collections in the following way:
Repositories offer the possibility for institutions to manage content and in the long term to preserve it. Putting content in such a system could result in the content being reused much more than if it was on a shelf gathering dust. One of the advantages of a repository is that each piece of content can be described in some detail via the input of associated 'metadata'. This acts much like a catalogue record in a library management system and allows searching across items within the respository. If the repository has the appropriate technology (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) the metadata can then be harvested by external services and exposed to the wider world. Open AccessOne of the main drivers for creating digital repositories in the UK has been the Open Access movement. Open access digital repositories are online web sites where authors or their designated intermediates deposit scholarly publications for anyone to read. The open access tag refers to the free availability of their contents to all. Thus there is, or should be, no subscription or registration required to read papers within them. However, not all repositories are open access, some secure access to specific items to local networks, locally registered users or a specific community. Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The Budapest (February 2002), Bethesda (June 2003), and Berlin (October 2003) definitions of open accessare the most central and influential for the OA movement. Peter Suber refers to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the BBB definition. Open access offers advantages to researchers, institutions and to humanity itself. Examples of Open Access repositories from around the world can be found using the OpenDOAR service References
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