History of the Institutional Repository
An institutional repository is an online resource for the storing in digital form of academic materials, such as theses, dissertations and research articles, on behalf of a university or other institution, whose history, while dating from the early 1990s, is a relatively short one. The average age of a repository in 2010 is about six years. Such materials, which would once only have existed in print format, and secreted in basements and other more primitive storage facilities, might be of a scientific, technological, artistic, cultural or historical nature.
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Early History and arXiv
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Institutional repositories began at the same time as the World Wide Web itself. The first online repository, centering on theoretical physics, was established in 1999 by physicist Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and known as arXiv--pronounced archive--although its current home is Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where it has been since 2001. ArXiv began life in 1991, before the Internet, as a server, or combination of computer software and hardware providing a service, when it was known as xxx.lanl.gov, and maintained by Ginsparg for a handful of high-energy physicists.
Later History and Open Archives Initiative
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Since the establishment of arXiv, it has expanded to include most other areas of physics, as well as mathematics and computer science. Its success led to the establishment of other institutional repositories, such as RePec, or Research Papers in Economics, CogPrints and Education Line, for, respectively, economics, cognitive and computer science and education, all of which were initiated in 1997. They eventually led to the Open Archives Initiative in 1999, which enables institutional repositories to operate together, a phenomenon known as interoperability.
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Further History and Software
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In 2001, the software known as EPrints was conceived for institutional repositories. Since then, other types of software for use by digital repositories have emerged, such as DSpace, launched by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, and Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture), which began life at Cornell University's Digital Library Research Group in 1997, while being a joint venture of Cornell University Information Science and the University of Virginia Library. Version 2.1 was released in 2005, while the most current version is 3.3.
Non-Academic Repositories
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In 2002, the history of the institutional repository received a further boost with the publication by Raym Crow, senior consultant for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) based in Washington, D.C., of a groundbreaking paper titled "The Case for Institutional Repositories." In it, Crow made the important point that, in addition to academic and scientific institutions, non-academic institutions such as governments might benefit from the maintenance of institutional repositories.
Leading Ten World Repositories
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As the history of the institutional repository proceeds at a more rapid pace than ever before, a list of no less than 400 leading IRs was published at the Spanish website SCIC in January 2010, titled "Ranking Web of World Repositories." Of the 440, the first ever IR, arXiv, was ranked number one, with six of the top ten IRs in the world being American, namely, in addition to arXiv, CiteSeerX, Scientific and Technical Information Network, Social Science Research Network, Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System and MIT Dspace at numbers 2, 3, 4, 6 and 10 respectively (CSIC). The history of the institutional repository has ensured that even by the standards of the Internet, there is a wealth of information available to Internet users that would have until only recently seemed inconceivable.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit notebook and books image by Sergey Galushko from Fotolia.com
