Design and development of institutional repositories: A case study

Institutional repositories (IR) are digital collections that capture, collect, manage, disseminate, and preserve scholarly work created by the constituent members in individual institutions. They are born out of problems with the current scholarly communication model developed by commercial publishers and vendors. The establishment of IR in the developing countries ensures that their national research becomes mainstream and contributes on an equal footing to the global knowledge pool. This paper presents the results of an effort to develop an IR of publications of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India. Since self-archiving is extremely sporadic, this repository is compiled from several identified, authentic sources by extracting metadata by constructing a suitable search strategy. The extracted metadata are standardized and duplicate publications are removed. The database is updated periodically and publications can be added and edited through the add publication module. The search module allows users to search by specific publication type. Links to full text are given wherever possible. The repository, named “PRABHAVI”, is web-enabled using Greenstone Digital Library software and can be accessed at: http://vidya-mapak.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/cgi-bin/library