WVU Unveils Institutional Repository Program
West Virginia University has launched the Electronic Institutional Document Repository (eIDR) program. According to eIDR programs manager, John Hagen, institutional repositories are digital library collections and related services through which internally generated research may be submitted, accessed and preserved on the Web. The eIDR system is available online at http://eidr.wvu.edu/.
The eIDR program includes portals to WVU graduate, undergraduate, faculty and administrative research collections. The Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (eTD) program serves graduate (master's and doctoral) students and has been a part of the graduation requirement since 1998. The Electronic Honors Theses (eHT) program serves undergraduate honors students and now requires submission of a thesis as a final capstone experience. The Electronic Scholarly Resources Archive (eSRA) serves faculty, staff, administrative and other student programs, and includes the entire range of scholarly research documents and publications such as pre-prints, post-prints, technical reports, white papers, conference proceedings, e-portfolios and institutional / administrative reports. The eIDR program vision is to assemble a total archive of scholarly research output at WVU. An overview of the collections and systems is available at http://eidr.wvu.edu/collection_overview.phtml.
The initial project began with implementation of the eTD program, now in its 8th year; Provost Gerald Lang was instrumental in spearheading this initiative at WVU. The program has now evolved to include an improved digital library system with new collections to serve the entire university community. The eSRA module followed with an initial pilot to collect ETD Symposia proceedings, and was recently migrated to the new eIDR system. The eHT module was added in fall 2005 to comply with the new Honors College requirements. With the assistance of a number of faculty and staff from the Office of Information Technology, the University Libraries, and the WVU ETD Task Force, the team has been working diligently since fall 2004 to complete the new submission and access portal systems on the Oracle platform. Oracle is the same system that WVU utilizes for its centralized human resources and accounting functions, and is used by many commercial institutional repository service providers.
The new eIDR system offers the following features:
Increased citation recognition: Recent studies indicate that individuals who self-archive their research in an open access institutional repository in addition to publishing in traditional scholarly venues are cited between 2.5 and 5.5 times more often than those who rely solely on academic journal publication.
Researchers benefit from the advanced and user-friendly search screen and faster access time.
WVU students, faculty, and staff have remote access to campus-restricted documents.
Students, faculty and staff have a secure and easy-to-use online environment to send, edit and complete online submissions.
Staff have automated administrative functions to better maintain the collection.
WVU is the 2nd institution in the world to have mandated a required eTD submission policy. WVU graduate research documents are now are accessed millions of times per year by academia, industry, government and the public from over 100 countries, and we expect similar usage among the new eHT and eSRA collections. The eIDR program is part of a growing trend of technological development that is transforming economies by providing access to research results to the world while bringing reciprocal investment back to the local level.
To access the WVU Institutional Repository brochure click here.
For additional information and resources about the Open Access Initiative at WVU see http://www.libraries.wvu.edu/open-access/.
For more information contact John Hagen at (304) 293-4040, ext. 4025 or see www.wvu.edu/~thesis.
Release Date: 29 November
2005
Last updated: 15-Apr-2008
John.Hagen@mail.wvu.edu