Institutional repository for global knowledge sharing

Abstract

An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution. It is a new concept for collecting, managing disseminating and preserving scholarly works created in digital form by users in individual academic institutions. An institutional repository is also 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. Deposit of material in an institutional repository is mandated by the institution. Some of the main objectives for having an institutional repository are to provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving in an open access repository, 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for an institution's scholarly research, and to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost literature such as theses, working papers or technical reports. Knowledge sharing is the voluntary process of transferring or disseminating knowledge from one person to another person or group in an organization or the intentional sharing of awareness and experiences among learners with the goal of not only enriching their own individual learning, but also of creating or maintaining a common repository of reusable knowledge objects.However, in this electronic publishing age, academic institutions including universities have increasingly recognised that an institutional repository is an essential infrastructure of scholarly dissemination. It is a means for institutions to manage the digital scholarship their communities produce, maximise access to research outputs both before and after publication and also to increase the visibility and academic prestige of both the institution and authors.